In wonder
What did You wonder?
What happened to you?
Wherever you where
That Afternoon
Then
What did you Do?
On September Eleventh
In the evening
What were you up to?
Tell us about Your Afternoon Action.
Post a link to your AfternoonAction on your blog in comments.
Or just comment here.
What did You wonder?
What happened to you?
Wherever you where
That Afternoon
Then
What did you Do?
On September Eleventh
In the evening
What were you doing?
Tell me your Afternoon Action.
You may post a link to your moment on your blog in comments or just comment here.
What did You do that afternoon?
Feel
Act
Wonder
Wander
Remember
Did your figure something?
About you and your life.
About what you love.
About who you are.
How did You respond wherever you where in the world?
What did You do September Eleventh Afternoon?
If you aren’t already enjoying Kate Shrewsday‘s blog on a regular basis you don’t know what you are missing. Do yourself a favor and click HERE to sample her lovely writing, then hit the follow button so you can enjoy Kate’s view of the world in the future.
Here’s a little something she wrote for 12 Days of Christmas STORIES (thanks Kate!!!)…
So Christmas wears on, and the presents are all open, the last vestiges of the turkey are finished, and this time two odd thousand years ago the smallest wise man would be asking asking the other two, “Are we nearly there yet?”
The question would not help matters. The charm of trekking across the desert after stars would have largely worn off, and the other two would scowl and hug their cloaks to them in the chill of the desert night.
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Experienceing the line between reality and fiction tastes indescribable, feels reality bending.
Reality, sometimes fluid often pliable can be the original awsome, even creepy, depending on the cultural vocabulary of images you can reach for when you attempt to describe what the hell just happend, or didn’t, either way, to yourself.
The universe isn’t so dull, is it, that each experiancer, always gets the same “unimaginable” experiance, always clearly describable in no uncertain terms, predictable, always positive or always negative or always neutral?
The boring-est movie ever is just like that. Zero ratings is just like the way I notice expecting my reality to behave: bland, unsurprising, predicable, all done before then institutionalized in some Bible or other. The terms, the code rules my experience snuggles under, folds into and creates itself by must be wearing a mass uniform.
My expectations must be so I can pass the boring enough test, sane enough test, scientific enough test, has it happened before enough test.
Then, if it happens to pass those tests, these ones will weed it out: The is it possible? imaginable? repeatable? duplicatable? Even the just credible tests I lay on myself cuz I sorta want to fit in turn my world pink and elephantine.
Does my world exsist?
Nah.
Squishing this me into a tiny cell I give myself as a sanity challenge doesn’t only look weird.
Squashes brain, constricts heart, deflates lungs, feet and hands cramp and tingle, tucked in tight.
I am gonna fit in. I wanna live in the world.
To live in here, is to fit in here.
Toes can’t even wiggle.
Wooooot! I am sane!
That and love began to exist the precise instant science figured out how to prove it does.
Before that, it didn’t exsist.
urgency flashes
a storm of wonder
tripped angling twirls asunder
drank two into three
gives away four
has five more than just before
of six impossible things
unexpected
un-suspecting me
Then I woke up.
Galaxy of Discovery
It was called
So I headed in to discover My
Discoveries
It would be like a journey in
the country
I thought
Just one hour, then leaving
I said.
I am on savasana. George isn’t, but we are wondering about the same things.
“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it.”
John Pilger
From Anti-Propaganda Propaganda
Defining propaganda has always been a problem. The main difficulties have involved differentiating propaganda from other types of persuasion, and avoiding an “if they do it then that’s propaganda, while if we do it then that’s information and education” biased approach. Personally I prefer the following definition provided by Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell: “Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”
What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state usually associated with Nazis and Communism.
From 10 Most Evil Propaganda Techniques
Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void in our…
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Perspective
Let the will of the Lord be done unto me…
Don’t bother sweetheart, you don’t have a choice.
This Annunciation transforms Pietà into His Mama Cries in one simple step.
***
Which hat? Choice can go a long way–Raptitude.com
Leonardo Da Vinci Annunciation
Fresh insight and fresh coffee over comics with friends
The potential release of Jon Venables is predictably accompanied by much wailing about how he is unfit for society. Perhaps he is, I do not know – but then, the vast majority of those who are wailing do not know either, they just love to wail.
For me there is a crucial point here that I doubt anyone will bother considering, what with having such a big, distracting bandwagon to so easily leap on. But my question is this:
How can it be possible that a boy, later a man, can spend 20 years in a ‘corrective institution’, and not be corrected?Just how utterly ineffective must it be to use prisons to punish people? How empty the rhetoric of rehabilitation for this to be the case?
If someone spent twenty years in a school and still couldn’t write, we’d close the school. 20 years in hospital and your arm…
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Two makes language. Two communicates.
Sad, I thought, when my sister hollered up the stairs: An airplane just crashed right into a building!
I don’t watch news.
Oh, my god! Another airplane just crashed into another building. Just now! Just now!
My mind flips into mode. I don’t react. I ask. What is going on?
My newborn is laying next to me, where I’m reading. I look at my tiny baby asleep safe on our shared bed. I gently snatch my precious two-month-old into my arms head for the stairs and march down with her nestled to my chest. I’m fixen to set to translating this language of two.
What is being said here?
But I lost my brain and train of thought waiting for the firefighters to rescue trapped people form that crash, to evacuate the first building. Two buildings side by side airplane wounded, bleeding smoke.
Tell me people got rescued. Common firefighters get up there already! Get up get out.
It’s about time for an update. Suspense isn’t joking. Are the people out of danger? Like when baby Jessica was in the well. I’m not sure I can stand them in there any longer when my body feels a backbone crushing from the bottom up collapsing me one vertebrae at a time. It disintegrated and went up in a cloud of dust I can’t breathe.
They didn’t have time to get out! They didn’t have time to get out! All those people. All those firefighters. I just commanded them to get in there! They did. They didn’t get out!
They didn’t have time to get out looped my brain.
I rebooted it. It turned to rescue people charred by the other plane. No way such collapse would happen again. It was a fluke. It was only a fluke. People will get rescued this time. This building will hold as buildings do. So get em out.
Get out!
My inner voice shouts. Hurry! It works as much as cheering a team playing a game on tv at making me feel better.
Nothing feels good enough and I can’t just sit here. Scouring the foot of the building hoping to see people come out is almost useless at so far off a screen view. Parched thirst for safety turns desperate like desert heat and blazing sun. The firefighters are in there. That’s no wet enough news. The spot on the ground I’m scrutinizing for exit movement liquefies. The tower squats down, shrinks, disintegrates, plunging my soul with it into a pile of rubble erupting ashes and dust of hope. Nothing makes sense now.
I look down at what I discover in my arms. Future in the baby face nuzzled at my breast vanishes. I can no longer imagine milk ever flowing out for her, again. There is no world now. No world for her to live in.
I ghosted back upstairs, put my sleeping child down in her un-safe spot on the bed, then went to find us some safety in a stillness, a quiet surrender to what is. Letting go of what I think and feel-a hopeless end. A world. Allowing something that just liquified and collapsed to begin to regenerate or reconnect in me, then to my world.
What desperate heart-piercing scream erupts in these two molten crushing voices?
I sit and search, finally melting into the stillness where life is.
Till I’m wretched out of a concentration maintained fragile focus by my sister. Another airplane hit the pentagon!
Goddam! War-cries explode into being inside me. Instead of lighting up with those, I flee to a quiet place to put out the fire and stitch the world back together.
Later the story of the plane down in a field jerks my mind the other way. That one did something to me.
I imagine my people taking out the pilot and going down with the plane. Finally, I don’t feel bound and helpless. My hero’s, my people, succeeded. They did stuff for me. I feel like my fellow citizens and some pretty sacred symbolic place got rescued.
The Brave. The cost! Imagining that person, those people, instantly facing death, trusting each-other, banding together, standing up, thrills me and cancels out the already-in-the-grave feeling of helplessness. At the last-minute choosing to go down with the airplane in a spot were no one else would be hurt, fired up hope again. These are my people! Fiction or not.
Then I thought of the hijacker.
The contrast for him. Alone. Thwarted. Failed. The creeps of failure along with death. The guy or gal who may have, according to the speculation, took that plane down dies a glorious death while even the children on that flight, doomed, where not enslaved and twisted into instruments of more destruction. This is a victory even in death-or something like that. Then I thought this is what really matters to me-to people.
One hijacker had the worst possible death. He died hopeless, a failure, crushed by letting down what he was willing to die to uphold. So, what was he upholding that mattered that much to him, then? What band of brothers did he feel like he betrayed? My emotions settled here, and everything started to make sense. This kid knew when he boarded the plane that he was going to die. He couldn’t chicken out. He couldn’t afford to really see one human being on that plane with him. No person could be more cornered or desperate, and sad. I wept for him. Then, I wept for his fellows.
When memorials were held, I scheduled my own. I’m already feeling like an American about my own American dead. So, I don’t focus there, were everyone else is already showing up. For each memorial, I brought a flower, to take time and felt the grief for each hero of a cause I don’t understand. And for his mother. For a kid compelled to shout-out that blood shrill for help. I don’t understand it. The kid, I figure, really didn’t understand it, either. We are equally lost in the world him and I. He stood for something just like my heroes. He was a person. He died failing, or triumphant. But that wasn’t what I wept for. I wept for the time he passed a beautiful American girl on a New York street and didn’t allow himself to see her beauty and love her, because he might have to kill her. She is them. This is not for me. Bitter tears dripped for the hours he spent at the airport, then on that plane looking at children, babies, couples in love, not seeing this was for him. Not seeing himself in them. I wept for his looking yet not seeing community, only death.
It took me a few years to tell another person after that first person I told. She looked at me like I’d swallowed the devil whole and alive. It doesn’t matter that I don’t agree with Osama Bin Ladin, even if he is not framed, but I let my heart try to hear the people he speaks for, is blasphemy. My position made me shake all over, but I can’t just pretend I feel different.
When Osama may (or may not) have been killed. I take it hard.
Every time the subject or name of Osama has come up for the last decade or so, I handle it by imagining Jesus getting accused. I don’t know anything, but he is my friend because I made a choice to listen to and honor him with my thoughts. I don’t know what he is saying, I’m just listening.
He just got crucified.
While my community celebrates, grief crushes me. I cry on my walk. Grief floods me making lunch, on my way to pick up my kid, while I play Runscape with my online friends, but I don’t talk about it to them. While walking off the feeling of indigence over my country taking-out my friend for me, my walking buddy Lois brings up the politics and his death. A lump grows and grows in my throat choking up tears I can’t hold back.
I lost my imaginary friend, today. Yet the grief is mostly over the idea of celebrating it.
Daily Prompt: Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma
Just our faces
It is only what it is
A chance
To lose
To gain in all-encompassing
Game on a disk inserted
Into a system,
Games end
Discarded in a pile
Scrap-booked old board game
Even Multiplayer Online Adventures
Being strengthens and fades
Connection delighted breach unfriended
Wins defeat perfect moments memories
Communion play lost found
Tulips beauty
Not everything
Touched
Not nothing
Facegifts-flowers
***
Weekly Writing Challenge: Mind the Gap
Nature has no name. Where wooed urgency tumbles into a howling excitement, desire, need, while I stare under a green world with the sky falling into me, and into the water below. New water, big fun water.
Fun gets whispered flowing in inaudible waves that catch and play a melody on my inner tuner. At first, they hadn’t been whispering. Suspicious, they changed their minds. Instantly, I sensed subterfuge and started asking questions.
You are too little. You can’t come. It won’t be fun for you.
They must mean my little brother. I can come. I can tell it will be fun for me.
No one helped me, though, so I helped myself. I did what everyone else was doing.
They told me not to come. I followed them anyway. The pack of them out-ran me fast disappearing far ahead while I am still in the familiar playground of the park in the woods across the street. They leapt like deer one after another into the bushes and disappeared.
They had all been changing into shorts. This was important for some reason. When they said I couldn’t, I proved that I could. I’d gone and done the same. Fishing a pair of shorts, my little brother’s were the first ones I could find, out of the big pile of clean laundry on the couch, where everyone else was getting theirs from. I proudly put them on, without help. I don’t need anyone to help me get dressed, see. Whatever they were going to do, I was coming.
I am wearing shorts I shouted, then screamed after them. My two older sisters, Nicky, she didn’t go to school either, Tosh was old enough to go to school, and Moe, he was already in fourth grade. Then there was my half-brother Ben, and a friend Matt. Moe and Tosh warned me not to follow them.
Stay here.
We were in the usual park across the street, where I played all the time. They warned me not come into the dangers after them. Danger wasn’t stopping me. My little brother didn’t come. He was the little one they were avoiding and not letting come. Not me, though. I am big enough. I headed straight for the trees were I thought I’d last seen them. My world went silent while I kept on going into the unknown.
I might get lost in here forever. Forever started to happen.
Just shy of forever, an intoxicating siren song of squealing roaring, fun, drifted into the silence or the scream of the endless forest. I could navigate by it, jumping over logs, creeping between trees, crawling under low branches squeezing through scratchy walls of pokey bushes.
They said I couldn’t. But I can.
I’m saved from being lost forever, maybe kidnapped by the sight of Ben, Tosh, Nicky, Moe, Trish, and Matt, splashing, laughing squealing shouting tag.
See, I can! I tear up to the edge of the creek shouting.
Surprise, then signs of exasperation turn the air to soup. Every glance up at me, a groan.
You can’t come!
We told you not to!
I’m here! See, I could, too, come. I’m so proud of myself that at first I’m smiling smug, triumphant, standing there, waiting to be accepted, and join the game. The fun stops.
I’m not taking her back, you take her back.
You are the one who couldn’t be quiet.
Well mom told you to take care of the little kids.
You ran too slow.
The nicest of my two big sisters tried to get me to leave back the way I came.
My next sister growled for me to stop ruining all the fun and just go away.
She might get lost, you need to take her back.
She ruins everything. I’m not taking her all the way back.
I’m not going!
Well you can’t swim!
Oh, that is what they are doing-swim. It’s what they were all talking about. That’s what they are doing. I could do that. It looks easy and fun.
I can swim if I want to. You are not my boss!
But you can’t.
Yes I can. I can if I want to.
Tosh splashes Matt and laughs at him. He lunges for her. She is the one who would say get out of here. I expect that.
You’re it!
She turns and tags Nicky. Ben lets Nicky catch up to and tag him, then roars after Moe.
Moe would tag me when he get’s caught, so I’m heading right into the game now. It felt like everyone was just right there, but when I try to join the game, I have to climb straight down a dirt bank as high as I am. I edge up to it and dangle my legs down over the side. It’s scary. But I’m calculating my leap into the water.
No! Moe shouts.
I’m dumbstruck. He is usually sorta nice to me, so him not wanting to play with me hits me where tears are. I start to sob and I can’t stop. Then, all the unfairness of it, the anger of being left out comes up in an epic wave of repressed wails. No one likes me and no one is nice to me fills up my chest with a bursting pain shattering my my body into shaking like I’m crying all over.
Shut up! You are ruining everyone’s fun! Tosh groans.
Ben is still chasing Moe, so he is gone somewhere where I can’t see him. Then he is somewhere else, then somewhere else. He looks at me every time he is somewhere else with a strange face that makes the wailing come harder. Tosh reproaching makes me madder, till I’m screaming uncontrolled at the top of my lungs cuz I don’t know what else to do. I’m almost beat. But I try to slide down and reach the bottom with my feet, but the bottom is water and my feet don’t reach it. I want to jump, but it’s not the ground I’ll land on and it’s high and to scary.
No one will help me, wells up in my chest and erupts in a fresh ear piercing howl of sadness and despair. I see it reflected on their faces.
Someone is gonna find out we are here if she doesn’t be quiet. But, I don’t care. If someone finds out, they will not be so mean, and help me play, too. So, I let my head start to pound with the shouting without letting up.
Matt swims over to the bank were I am. He looks up at me with a different face and says something I can’t hear while I’m screaming my head off.
You want to come swim?
Yes! I stop crying like the sun came out.
You need some help getting in?
Yeah, but no one will help me.
I want to help you.
The soup in the air vanishes, it’s slurped up and a fresh breeze blows through the trees and through the trees in me.
He comes close to the bank and looks up at me. Can you jump? I’ll catch you. His head disappears under water then bobs back up.
Where did you go?
Moe stops and gets caught. She doesn’t know how to swim!
I can to jump! It scars me, but I’ll do it, I’m thinking. But where did Matt just go?
Why do you keep going somewhere?
My feet don’t touch the bottom here. I have to swim to not go down. I can catch you, but if you can’t swim then you might go down and not come back up.
I thought of Moe disappearing then coming up somewhere else. I’d do that.
I’ll do what Moe is doing.
Do you know how to swim?
I think so.
Have you swam before?
No.
Oh, then I better not bring you down here. Your mom would be really mad at me if you went and drown.
What is drown?
It’s when you go down but don’t come back up.
I thought about Moe going down and I wonder about where he is, and wonder and wonder cuz he doesn’t come back up.
But I will come back up. Why wouldn’t I?
Well you have to know how to do it. If you never did it before, you don’t know how and you will go down and not know how to come back up.
Oh.
If that happened, you mom would be real sad. She would never see you again.
My mom would be sad if I were to go down and never come up?
The idea struck me. Mom would be sad if I went down and didn’t come back up?
Are you sure she would be sad?
Yes, I’m sure. She would be so sad and real mad at me.
The idea felt like a miracle bloom. I’d never even Imagined mom would be sad if I never came back.
Oh, and I sat down at the edge of the drop off, happily watching my family wade and swim, totally content that mom would be sad if I drowned.
A deep contented satisfaction filled my chest growing till it moves outside of me all around me filling the creek and the water. Watching everyone who would take me across the water but didn’t do it so I wouldn’t go down and not ever come back up, and that mom would be sad if that happened to me and she never saw me again, felt fine. It was nice. Since they couldn’t carry me across but wanted to, that means they did want me playing with them. And all we needed was a bridge.
Bliss erupted! Out of it shot a bridge. A bridge appeared right in the middle of the swimming hole. I leap onto it run across like a deer hop off then splash into the shallows on the gravely beach on the other side. I feel myself swimming, laughing in a paradise of cool water like the creek over near the park, but lots more and fun, and I dip and duck under and splash my sisters.
A deafening sound blows me off my balance, turning my mind blank. I don’t know what happened. When I open my eyes everyone stopped playing and stared shocked out of their minds. I look up at the difference everyone is staring at.
The tree that had been to my right and just behing me, lay right across the middle of the pool.
Blinking, I stare at it. Then follow the length with my eyes. It goes to the other side where feeling like I’m playing.
Oh! My bridge! Yay! I think, leaping up onto it and skip like a deer to the other side, hop off, and dash to the water.
Wow, you are brave. Ben stares at me with a face I don’t understand. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere close to that thing. It almost landed on us.
Why? It’s all right. It’s my bridge!
I am four.
Daily Prompt: The Natural World
natura morta (Photo credit: Circolo d’Arti)Become immortal
Drink it
Tried that last time
Oops I died
Game over
Re-group
Re-design
My Earth-Game-Plan
Gather more supplies
Wait for the team
Return
Start over
Damn
My character falls
For it
Hoping like hell
I won’t have fell
This time
Messing up my glorious
Virtual-reality-
Multi-player-adventure-game
Again
Still mortal?
Yes!
Onward!
Fun
To
Quest Complete!
“You’ve imbibed a special potion that makes you immortal.
Now that you’ve got forever, what changes will you make in your life?
How will you live life differently, knowing you’ll always be around to be accountable for your actions?”
Daily Prompt: No Longer A Mere Mortal
Trees
My friends
Fairies inspiration
Living pets
Hugging company
Inner
Mind
Playing tennis
With a
Holy ghost
A heart
A pet
In here
Somewhere
Fun
Wonder
Companionship
***
Weekly Photo Challenge: Companionable
“I can’t believe I still have to stand here and hold this sign!” Woman supporting filibuster outside Texas Capital.
So I can take a pill to take back my period.
“Being gay is not a choice, but being a bigot is.” I instantly re-tweeted from God@thetweetofgod. It’s funny, not true.
Took me a while to figure out how it’s not true, but like art which is not true, it points to truth. Like the Pietà, Michelangelo’s sculpture that shows Mary the mother of Jesus strong and tall while her crucified son is like a child in her arms. Not necessarily true proportions, just true about a mother’s heart.
I don’t believe being a bigot is a choice. It’s not a permanent state of being, either. Gay is permanent, judging from my straight perspective, though I might be off. But bigot is like pregnant. It’s a state. It may or may not be a choice. It can and will, usually, end. It’s story and outcome are what epic is made of. Plenty of bigotry ends in abortion. Other bigotry ends with new life. Bigotry, yes, is human. Mine and yours. It’s a place on a journey, a grade in school, an incomplete quest. What we do with it may become art.
High school kid calls fifth-grader stupid.
Well, she don’t know The Grapes of Wrath isn’t fruit!
Art doesn’t make sense, it helps me make sense-of people.
This “Yes-we-are-allowed-to-end-a-relationship-before-it-bigins-filibuster is pregnant.
Art is being made here. Bigotry is a shiny material.
Inspired history feels like community committed art. HIstory is being made here.
Could making history be making art?
Consuming this product may cause joy.
“Evil” is permanently banned from usage. It’s the way we use it that sucks.
Not ban the word evil. Just its use, its interpretation.
The word “evil” is a cop-out.
Daily Prompt: If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
Young Helen Keller is evil in our current interpretation. Anyone who can’t see, hear and so, speak human, and therefore acts in an incomprehensible way, terrifying, terrified and violent and we feel we can do nothing to stop it qualifies as “evil”.
Evil is where communication failed. Evil is an un-touched child in a grown-up body. Evil is an impossible extreme were only an Anne Sullivan destined to attempt the impossible finds purpose and fulfillment and something priceless.
Yet, once the magic word “evil” gets applied, challenge extinguished. You don’t have to stretch, work hard, grow, come to understand or be accountable for your actions toward anything tagged “evil”. You can do the same things “Evil” did or does without becoming “evil” yourself. It works, I promise. It’s a game of tag. It’s a magic bullet. It is the most useless word for getting any peace and happiness, except for in the form of entertainment. Movies and stories of “good” vs “evil” are fun.
If you want action-adventure, to fight and be right and win, if you want to use the essential word “evil” to set up this story-game, set it in Middle Earth, a galaxy far far away, or The Matrix. There is no place for this word among human beings in this realm. Here, when tempted to label any person “evil”, consider it a sign of ignorance. Maybe it’s a moment to reconsider what you believe and an opportunity to connect a Helen Keller with her Anne Sullivan. It may become a heart warming story. And perhaps, only the one right person may be the answer.
Failure to see the truth and find the right solution and connection does not equal “evil”. It just makes a mess like failure to find the solution that works in any other kind of problem. It’s just an unfinished adventure story, success story. When you see “evil”, you are on that exciting catalyst dilemma part of the story where you can’t see the truth yet. It’s one of the best parts of any great story, though it’s challenging. If you tag it “evil”, there is no adventure, no story, no growth, no fun for your superhero. And you become what you see. By seeing “evil”, you become the antagonist. Have fun being the antagonist while thinking you are the hero.
“Evil”, like “sodomite” is a magic bullet irrelevant interpretation of a word. It only works like “Tag! You’re it!”, or normal people transforming into Agents when they see “evil” , if you are playing tag or plugged into the matrix.
Possible interpretations for the word evil:
I tried everything and failed.
I don’t know were to find the person who has got the medicine for this.
I don’t understand this person/problem. Can someone else f-ing figure this out?
That is an “evil” person, project problem, we need an Einstein.
No satisfactory solution or balance has ever been achieved here, yet.
It seems impossible, but since it needs to get done, it is possible.
WTF! I am so not the person for this issue!
Help!
Evil
I know there are lots of other options, just can’t think of them just now.
Daily Post: If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
You know, it only looks like they can work. But they can’t. They are missing something it takes to get a job and work.
They lost all self-esteem. It was amputated. They are doing what they can with what they got. You can’t get a job without some self-esteem and they don’t have any at all. They are doing what they can do without it.
That beggar looks perfectly good to work. That’s what we think. But begging is what they can do. So they do it.
Get a job! I’m not giving them one penny.
My sister voice acts, while rummaging for her purse in the back seat. On our way to Bikram Yoga, she finds it, takes out her wallet pulls out two dollars, rolls down the window then wishes the young woman with the sign a good day with it.
You know, I just learned this. I figured it out from a pattern in the suicidal vets I interview.
It’s a pattern. He grew a conscience. The pain he saw or caused or aided and abetted, wasn’t justified after all. He quite buying into “it was the right thing to do”. I was just following orders, just doing my job, does not cover him anymore.
I killed those people, hurt that man. The right thing to do for America and liberty, I don’t believe it anymore. They are dead. I can’t bring them back. I am that person, a person who can and did do it.
It’s becoming a post-facto murderer, a murderer with a conscience. It’s becoming a monster. It’s taking responsibility. It is a total loss of dignity and self-esteem. It is suddenly discovering “I am a Hitler”.
Sudden, or bit by bit, a feeling of being just like, no different from Hitler, while feeling total disgust for him, is self-esteem apocalypse. Got a few million people horrendously executed, now you realize it wasn’t for liberty and justice, or to make the world a better place. You weren’t doing your duty ridding your country of monsters, lice, mosquitoes, terrorists, roaches, and child molesters, and making it safe. One or many dying human faces, has the same effect.
No, it was not for a just cause. I killed innocent, men woman and children, for nothing.
It was a mistake.
I did it.
Now where do I go from here? That wouldn’t even be a question.
There is nowhere to go.
Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge The World Through Your Eyes
The handsome strangers whipped the towns people into a frenzy, a witch-burning riot for blood-relief extasy. They just had to take them. They had to have them now. You know, like a mosh pit out there, no one willing to take no for an answer. There was no security and no manners.
Bring them out that we may “know” them!
The mob of rioters surrounding the house didn’t chant “please”.
The towns people broke down the door to get at and gang-rape the two fine men.
These irresistible men where Lot’s house guests. Lot helped his fabulous angel friends make a Hollywood escape. Then, he had to get the hell out of there before the town lynched or raped him instead. Probably just lynch actually, he wasn’t that hot.
The townships were Sodom and Gomorrah. Both towns got nuked for their wicked behavior that day.
The one and only problem here is the town-mob not gang-raping women. That’s why sodomy means gay. So, gay is really bad. Like Sodom and Gomorrah fire from heaven bad.
Couldn’t pass this up!
Mommy, does a fake smile count?
Hypocrisy, fake smile, self-righteous, were words mother said in a tone that told me she is right, and fake smilers are exceedingly wicked.
Wasn’t sure what all that meant, but I couldn’t stop wondering about this song we sang, and fake smiles:
My mother told me something
Every boy and girl should know
It’s all about the devil
We learn to hate him so
Let the sunshine in
Face it with a grin
Smilers never lose
And frowners never win
Let the sunshine in
Face it with a grin
Open up your heart
And let the sunshine in
So do hypocrite fake smiles always win, too, mommy?
This baffled my mother, at first. Mostly cuz six was to young for the nuances of good and evil. First she ignored me. Then suddenly she froze, gave me a bewildered look, while invisible wheels churned light into her eyes.
She stopped writing, put down the pen, stopped eyeing the phone, sat down. Then she beckoned me to her, pulled up a chair for me, waited for me to sit down then paused before she focused her passionate attention on me, for a solemn inner circle grown up talk. She captivated me with the sacred duty of the righteous and temptation and lies and evil. I listened rapped about the cunning of the devil, his fake smiles, and his cruel war on God and His people.
By the end of this intimate time capsule I know who is good, who is bad. Bristling, I brandished my inner hero’s sword eager to vanquish all the wicked once and for all. Point me in the right direction. I feel incensed. I will stop children suffering, persecution of the innocent. I’d assassinate Hitler myself, if I could, but I’ll settle for the next devil’s servant. Why didn’t a hero assassinate Hitler once and for all and save millions of lives? It couldn’t have been that hard! These new bad guys are worse than Hitler though, because they are wolves in sheep’s clothing, with beguiling fake smiles. I want to single-handed take out all these villans. I know the Bible stories and now I know who the bad guys are here and now, same as the Bible wicked. I know who and where they are and can’t wait to get at them. All hypocrites, acting like they are the good guys of course.
I was smart enough to notice that the song’s smilers might not include hypocritical ones. So I was pretty smart. But not bright enough to see the God/Devil frame of reference for what it just might be, a gaming structure. I totally bought into it.
Jumping on the trampoline with my daughter in this cool spring Texas sunshine and feeling like a kid, laughing I bust out singing a sunshine song. This particular one. I hadn’t even remembered this song in ages and ages, but when I sang it aloud to my daughter, to my horror, I found myself recommending hate as a way of life.
Hey, I was reaching for sunshine not a road to holocaust, here. This song is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. No wonder I keep ranting about good and evil, God™ as trademarkable, and the devil as arbitrary and customizable to our needs and prejudice. This kind of rubbish is stuck in here somewhere. My mind hadn’t tagged this ditty as b.s. yet. I wonder how much other rubbish is in here un-sorted, not hazard yellow corded , not yet trashed. My un-tamed poisoned frame of reference is dangerous.
This one has vicious fangs, hiding somewhere in my brain filed under “sunshine” and “open up your heart”. An invisible place holder, lurking here, the sheep clad wolf in my mind. It’s a given by this conditioning that it’s my job as a good little girl, and citizen, to hate the Devil and vanquish evil.
Now all I need to do is just fill in the blanks with Evil’s description. Pick one. Or choose your favorite not mentioned here: Jews, Indians, witch, terrorist, religious fanatic, heathen, unbeliever, Philistine, homosexual, evil person, Muslim, American, apostate, criminal, negro, _______ … I should by truth and right bring just punishment to whichever my upbringing tells me to fill in the blanks with. It’s my right and duty. It’s the heroic thing to do.
Not to long ago, Jews filled in the blank for almost the entire world, not just Germany, like we choose to remember. For our joy in Western shows and cowboys and Indians, Indians rightly filled in the just-kill-em-slaught, of evil. Evidently, somewhere I must still have a lynch em, exterminate em, and the world will be better for it, slaught. Who will I fancy to fill my free slaught with next? Give me the right propaganda and I’ll give you my slaught to fill. Then I’ll support exterminating whomever is put in my evil= ________ slaught.
“God”, good guys = ___________ , must be a blank slaught, too. What if it is a place-holder that could work the same way as the devil place-holder? Rather like any game with rivals. It takes at least two to play any exciting sport. Yeah, I want the game. I like games, too. But I don’t have to hate the kids playing for the other team. Do I?
They know they are the good guys and I am the bad guys, just as sure as I know what I know. They are just as committed to good, truth and justice. Just as willing to fight and die for it. They have their own lovely sunshine ditties, and loving mommies who know without a doubt who the bad guys are and what duty bound honor dictates we must do to them.
Silence invests in me
Doing nothing
Sets Inward free
Is a liberal education
Investing me into it
Or it in me
Invest in me|
I become original
Add to being
Rather than fitting
A brick in a wall
A dollar in a wallet
Liberal educated
For a library fee
When college classes aren’t
Anymore
Making me more me
***
“How do you grow?”
“By investing in yourself.”
Shuronda Robinson of MakingThingsClear.com
From Panel discussion at Woman’s Entrepreneurial Luncheon 2013 Austin Texas
Gaby and I can talk…best friends and sisters.
Realms touch
Powers mingle
Magic born
Of fairies
In people
Impossible charmed
Wind alive
Unimagined desire
Dot a dot
Life on fire
Dream physics
Demand require
Honey-dipped moon
Mother heart
Solid revere
Human art
You can write goddamit!
I have no time for pleasantries, which may not please, but it’s a modern disease, days like these force us to squeeze every moment dry till the great goodbye when we can only lie and see the sky fully for the first time and ask why we didn’t do so before, why did profit and product conduct us so, to forgo our very reason for being.
I am fighting to get my life back, while in my heart I just want to sleep in a mist that can steal my memories and make a truly new man of me without the history of such fierce gravity, or the knowledge which only teaches that tomorrow holds no releases.
How do I fit into this world without becoming more like its sickness?
If we protected with the same zeal as we persecute, though perhaps without the disgusting vicarious glee, then we might…
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Part ii of:
Because Every Day Is Fucking Magical
Watch your step. Come in. Come in!
Right through this door. No mater that you don’t see it.
You step over the threshold into an aura magnificence. You can tell by the eager faces behind you.
You feel it. You bow your head. You bow because the person if front of you bowes.
The line of visitors behind you eagerly push you forward. Ceiling is lower. You bow deeper.
You are compelled.
Reverence by low ceiling.
Lower, lower. You bow.
Then you kneel before the Alter of Le Clown.
The passage is narrow. The way through is forward.
You do obeisance to LeClown. LeClown trademarked God™. Waywardspirit heisted LeClown’s magnificence™.
So God™ is in Waywardspirit’s pocket.
As you bow before the altar of Le Clown owner of God™ your power got sucked out of you and into Waywrdspirit’s Magical Power-Saver Gene Jars™.
Your power just got sucked out and stored up just like when you sign your signature.
Thanks for coming.
Invite your friends.
Come back next week for great rewards in heaven™.
You’ve earned them!
Part iii …coming next week.
Security richness joy
Already installed
Reboot
Power switch
Re-create experience
By feeling what is not
Neither is heart
Nor want
Not that
Not art
In this life model app
Desire attracts support
I don’t matter
Is Gravity
I matter
I gravity defie
Evil is a gravity
Invisible don’t fly
The world is cartoon.
Why look down?
Daily Challenge:
Half Empty or Half Full
Lost hungry about to fall
Peril crouches
Wayward
Dark angry gnaw
A way
To find myself
Delight taste
Take the Hand that lifts me up
Make a superhero’s day
Tumble down the hole again
To make another friend
Come to me trolls!
Line up
Line up for kisses
A world needs some more
Lots more handsome princes
Wonder up
Sweet over something
Trip and break one mind
Frolic through answers
Feasting inside
Twist into existence
Leave this window ajar
Re-introduce
Magical spicies into our wild
Daily Post Prompt: Your Inner Dickinson
I need to kill something, but, I hate to hurt things and people. I know I don’t like it cuz I have tried both.
Never got over all the cacti I chopped down pretending I was slaughtering the enemy. No I was not clearing land. Just fighting the enemy. Moaning succulents and cactus’ tears didn’t stop me. Falling limbs from soft giant weeping cucumber,warriors thuded my heart a flutter. I still did it, in spite of the sinking feeling. The exhilaration one was intoxication. A great feeling – cutting down the enemy. But I felt sad, too. Sometimes I said sorry under my breath as the lovely star-shaped slices thumped and splatter on the ground. That hurt my heart. But I couldn’t stop.
Like I couldn’t stop playing violent video games. Like I can’t stop blaming other people and making them wrong, and into monsters in my mind when I judge.
Nope, the games and the t.v. didn’t make me violent.
Fighting for peace, and for liberty did. The epic war stories. The Bible heroes. But I had to enjoy them first. Nope, I was born a howling kid. Violence is my birthright.
Thank God for violent video games!
I need to kill something.
“— an effort to pin complex social or psychological issues on an enemy that can’t fight back.”
Weekly Writing Challenge: Mind the Gap
Ah, looking up
The sky’s in my eye
I’m not quite as lost as a star
Me and the leaves
Turning brown, drifting down
We’ll live again blown on a breeze
Existing Between Story Lines
You make me
Feel
I live in
The books I read
Still
A cyber story space
Nowhere in story
Somewhere
To meet you there my friends
We all exist between the lines
Of the words that we create
Life
A living spirit jumps
Peacefully off this page
I keep it
It keeps me
Company
Abortion Lovers Unite!
For MORE live birth abortions
Vote For Me!
You know you like it.
Don’t let Anti-Abortion laws stop you from having all the lovely abortions (preferably live-birth) you want!
It’s Your Choice!
Vote For Me!
There. We Now Have The Anti-Abortion’s Opposition!
Sadly, it didn’t exist before.
My passion she –
She chose her Way
My now
My choice
How to
Not
Or feel
Today
***
My baby might not live she whispers; hollow calm lands on my stunned disbelief.
I’m staring at nothing, holding my breath mind goes blank. It’s about the phone. How did I get a call here?
This is a clinic. I’m at a clinic for my pre-natal. No one is that interested in my baby or my check up. It’s just us now. Who would call here for me or care how my check up went? When I walked out of the exam room, The nurse blankly informs me I have a phone call. Before I can protest, some confusion, she qualifies.
You are Jessica LeBaron right?
I nod.
She leads me to the front desk. Confused shock has me when the receptionist staring at the file cabinet hands me the phone.
I’m bewildered.
I didn’t give anyone this number.
Shock didn’t know which to choose, Eva’s unexpected voice and those words. What do they mean? How did I get any call at a midwives’ office.
Eva knows I would be at a clinic on Ben White. That’s it. She is seeing her doctor today too. We were going to talk about our maternity checkups when we got home. Our random appointments ended up being on the same day. This serendipity delights us. Not as much as finding our we are due within the same two weeks though. We thought of riding together to our appointments, but it hadn’t worked out. Our appointments were at almost the same time like our babies, at opposite ends of town.
We were room mates after I got separated, till she got married. We are best friends. We are having babies together. We are excited. We both laugh a lot-till now.
I lose control of my jaw.
Did you hear what I said: My baby isn’t going to live.
She is quiet till I grasp and gasp.
Oh, Eva! I whisper into the receiver.
My baby is not going to live, she repeats with stunned emotion.
Oh. All I can do is sigh.
I’m calling you first because I know you would understand. Would you come over?
Yes, I’ll be right over. I’ll be right there.
Okay, then.
We hang up.
I turn around and rush back to the midwife.
Please help me! My throat clenches tears in my eyes. My friend. She just found out her baby may not live. What do I do? How do I help her?
I don’t feel like I can do her any good.
They tell me how to just be there, to listen and allow her to grieve. I can help then, I figure.
We were going to meet at my apartment. But I go to hers, now. She is on the couch wrapped up in her arms staring into space. She turns and stares at me. Just stares. We stare at each other. The emotional territory was to expansive and explosive to enter. Everything is numb and blank and hurt.
I’m going to a specialist for another sonogram. The doctor is sure of what he sees, or doesn’t see, but he sent me to a specialist. I can’t believe he knows what he is talking about.
I need to calm down. I need to call mom and dad. I still have to tell Jon. How do I tell Jon? I can’t tell Jon!
Jon is out-of-town for another few weeks on in-between job training for the new one. Eva’s parents live in Arizona. She asked me to come. We go to the second appointment together. It’s scheduled around my classes. It was the quickest appointment she could get. Either way I was going.
Five happy moms smile contented almost cooing rubbing their bellies or reading baby magazines in the comfortable deep cushions of the waiting room. I try to do none of those things. We only glance at each other, hoping not to convey despair to the blessed. We don’t talk or leaf through baby magazines or act blessed however. We fidget till we are called back into the brightly lit sonogram room.
The sonogram technician had a softness about her gentle way. Eva lies on the table. I sit in the chair next to her. After she introduces herself and settles Eva she squeezes warmed gel into Eva’s hand then waits for her to rub it around her belly with hopeful stokes. Eva wanted to apply it herself. She places the ultra sound device on Eva’s belly. We all turn to the screen.
First we hear it. A familiar heartbeat. Everything good and normal so far! Eva sighs, fights back tears, stays calm.
We follow the image watching intently as the tech labels and describes the sonogram in a matter of fact way.
The amniotic fluid is very low. There is almost none.
This is the heart here. It’s located on the right side.
Here are the lungs. They under-developed.
Kidneys should be here. Pause.
All of this could be good or at least okay or remedial, we are hoping. We look at each other with another flashing spark of hope. Get some synthetic amniotic fluid inject it, no problem, or something like that.
So what is the problem then? So everything is really okay?!
Well, kidneys are not visible.
What does that mean?
I assume she will just keep on looking till she finds them.
I am not finding kidneys.
What does that mean?
Kidneys manufacture and filter the amniotic fluid. The amniotic fluid gets breathed into the lungs. It is how lungs develop. There is not enough amniotic fluid to develop the lungs. Kidneys are not producing it. There is only one and it is small.
Can that be fixed? Can one be added or something? I could give one.
Even if we could fix that. This shows that the heart is on the right side instead of the left.
Lungs this small won’t catch up in time to breathe at birth, or ever.
Eva whimpers and hides her face.
This small kidney here. Too small to filter enough blood. No kidney visible here…
Stop stop! Stop it! Please stop telling me wrong things about my baby! Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me anymore. She breaks down sobbing shaking, just contained urgent wailing trapped in her not catching her breath.
Tech leans forward pats her and lets her cry.
I understand how hard this is for you. I am sorry.
When she recovers her voice after a while, the tech asked if we were ready to see what the doctor had to say. She Tech led us to the waiting doctor.
His gentleness let her fall apart, again.
She wept then cried out: Why? Why did this happen?
There is no reason. No cause that we know of.
So this just happened to my baby for no reason? She demands.
I’m sorry there is nothing I can do to make this easier, but yes. It’s sad that someone like you who really wants a baby doesn’t get one when I’ve seen babies survive a whole bottle of Drain-O, just fine.
We look at each other horrified.. How could someone not want a baby?
We know the stories, yet we are incredulous. Unfairness is deep.
When you are ready, we can talk about what you want to do next. Come back as soon as you are ready to consider what course of action you want to take.
This is a great loss for you. You and your husband must have been very excited about the arrival of your first child. Take a day. Come back in a day or two. After you talk to your husband, to discuss what you want to do. Be back within two days, I’ll see you whenever you come. He soft smiled warm reassurance then he got up and left.
Like what? What we can do, didn’t hit us till we got home.
Next appointment is about risks and options.
Should I go full term or terminate and start the healing process?
The child can’t breath. It will never breath. It won’t ever function or live. It will suffocate as soon as it’s born, if it doesn’t die during the stress of birth or even before then. It could die at any time.
You could decide to carry to term. If you decide to go full term you need to be seen every week in case the fetus expires and labor doesn’t start. That could lead to blood poisoning, a risk. Otherwise, you can go into labor at any time. There is no way to predict an outcome.
Then in the middle of bewildered not, letting go while not wanting to hold on, or prolong anguish, and wondering, he drops another bomb:
If you are going to choose to end it, he pauses with a sigh of frustration, you have three days to decide. In three days third trimester, anti-abortion laws come into effect. If you don’t choose to terminate in the next three days, after the three days, we can no longer assist you in termination. You must either go into labor, or your life be in danger for the pregnancy to be terminated.
I have to decide now?
You must decide, if you want to take action, yes, within three days. After that there is nothing we can do. Our hands are tied. The law is clear. No exceptions. No third trimester procedures. Third trimester starts in three days.
We sit on her couch staring into space and crying. Her crying makes me cry. I feel the loss of my son all over, plus her loss. By heart about bursts. It has been five years, but when I found out in the middle of getting divorced that I was pregnant, I considered not going through with it, just to be responsible to myself.
I’m in the middle of school with two kids to keep and figure out how to support without a partner. I’m still not able to describe what is going on, but the idea of losing a baby on accident or on purpose both add up the same in my feelings. The idea of adopting my baby out to someone else is unthinkable. We may have no stable future, but in the world I exist in now, I have no other choice. In about a week I love the baby as I knew I would. It would be stupid for me to put my heart up for adoption, or to end the relationship. Even if it’s not responsible to have a child without support, I surrender to being a single mother and feeling happy with Eva.
Now this.
Her parents arrive. I go back to school grieving indignant, and remembering.
While I volunteered for Campus Crusade for Christ and attended the meetings that rallied Christians and got Bush elected in the early nineties I was into the anti-abortion campaign, especially no third trimester abortions. Now something is happening. It’s not black and white anymore.
I can’t just not be pregnant anymore just like that Eva steady wails! The kids at school…the other teachers..the girls they pat my tummy lined up on the way out of class.
If someone asks me if it’s a boy or a girl when I get back I don’t know what I’ll do. Everyone will ask.
Have you got a name yet Miss?
How are you Miss?
How is that baby?
I couldn’t keep explaining there is no baby, her voice cracks, for another three months…but it will be right here…
For three more months. I couldn’t work this way. I couldn’t explain it either. I will just bust out crying, for the next three months. I couldn’t work this way. I’d just be knowing the baby is not going to live or already dead. I don’t know what to do!
I could stay home and be with the baby. It’s to soon to make this choice. I wish Jon could come back and be here. He can’t take off till the end of the week. We have till tomorrow to decide.
Now, I’m in this government class writing a paper about laws. I have allot to say about how stupid this anti-abortion law is. It’s taking Eva to a whole new level of misery, like insult on injury.
My government teacher read only my outrage essays to the class while I skipped it. I went to the hospital with Eva to celebrate the sacred death and birth of her son. Jon couldn’t get back in time. The law couldn’t wait.
We were into our babies.
If she had not been into her baby there would be noting to cry about.
Abortion is like a break up with the baby when this relationship just isn’t working both ways, before you marry…When I’m just not into you.
A shaman woman I know, went into a sacred meditation to talk to the child when she discovered their relationship. She talked to it and listened. She acknowledged their relationship.
I’m thankful you like me she told him. It was a boy. You chose me to be your mother. So I am. Yet, it’s not a good time for me to be in this relationship. Would you try again later?
She got a “sure”.
Next day she started bleeding and thanked her child for honoring her choice.
Wonderful woman I know made their choices to not be mothers when they were not ready. That choice did not include being an oven to bake a child for nine months then give it to someone else.
The adoption choice works good for some people, which is cool.
Pregnancy in the 26th week. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Me? No way is my body gonna be forced to make a lonely baby whom I’m not attached to. No way would I choose to be sick for months, throw up constantly, gain forty lbs, go through labor delivery blood spouting major surgery that takes weeks to recover from, while everyone is wondering, family asking as I’m to wiped out to take care of myself, with no support just to give some one a baby for free.
Pretty dumb all around, if you ask me.
There is nothing wrong with adopting out. I’m personally not into it-at all.
It’s defiantly not the only valid response to birth-control malfunctions. There are as innumerable appropriate valid responses to unplanned pregnancy. As many as there are woman and situations.
The relationship between mother and child is what it is to me. I am in or I’m not. Just like any other relationship.
I can break up. A possible child need not force me.
Babies don’t force me to become their mother. Nor does a baby need to endure a horrible non-wanted toxic environment. It’s a crappy co-dependent relationship that way.
I choose if I want to invite a spirit into a body with my body, into my life. I choose if I want to help someone else by baking a baby for them. I am a free woman. I have lots of choices! Perhaps unborn spirits have choices we don’t know about.
Wouldn’t put it past them. I bet, babies would choose to be happy and mom be happy, too.
Or maybe babies are the selfish assholes?
Baby (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Terrified
Swatting at 1986 killer bees
Today
Agreed upon sanity
Scarce Sweetness
Called sane
Madness’ taste of fairy honey
Holding on breath
The way of our bodies
Whimsically true
Parallel planes entwined
***
Weekly Writing Challenge:
Playing With Space
Interesting:
Imperfection’s part of love
Wabi sabi‘s story of
Frayed edges of insane
Being ecstasy and bane
Cracked heart chipped cup
Shattered then not giving up
Hero and villan of our tale
We’re all the same
Be real
cherished
Evolving imperfection
Daly Post
Daily Prompt:
Imperfection:
Close Up: Magnificent mosaic mural on the corner of 11th Street and San Marcos in Austin.
Close Up: Feeling Perspective on the corner of Waywardspirit Blog and WordPress Plane.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Color
The Seasons
Turn
Life morphs her form
Season reasons
Moon cycles burn
Creative season Springs
Work zodiacs then learns
Favorite season creates
Contemplation Falls on me
Play dances us away
Random Harvests time
Dark Night of Winter’s Soul
Summer is Winter riding low
Two weeks vacation sweetens
Two month’s fruit
Then, forced a Season
Daily Post
Daily Prompt:
Turn Turn Turn
***
Alma Mater
Stillness my speech
School of Life
We all attend
Most unlucky
So fortunate
No school trapped me
Sweet Alma Mater
My library
***
My Attention
Riot of peace
Currency to pay
My best companion
Fountain of joy
The Observer
Gone away
Kidnapped
Wafted off like smell
Forgotten-what are you?
Wooed away
Trapped
Stuck
Wrapped up by emotions
Squeezed out my mind
Daily Post
Daily Prompt:
Most Prized Possession:
National Poetry Writing Month
NaPoWriMo:
We shouldn’t be best friends
Doesn’t change
In the realm were we are still
Written, unwritten letters
Advice you would give me
It’s “you said”, not “he said”
Because I talk to you
Tipping his head, your head
Back against the mattress
To look up at me
Feels the same remembered
We are not friends anymore
And always best friends
***
Daily Prompt: http://wp.me/p23sd-4tQ
Third from the top: The Size of Life:
Post: Story Try This: “We shouldn’t be best friends,” he said, tipping his head back against the mattress to look up at me.
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Ingredients for magic
Or a spell
Studied or cast
Present or past
This magic you weave
Weaves me
Daily Post Daily Prompt: Share the Love: http://wp.me/p23sd-4tP
The Road for Transport-A Poem
My Most Precious
Willowy sapling Attention
Blown away
Oft transplanted
Run over
Mowed
Uprooted
You may be
A Presence of redwood ent
More than shade fruit or would
Transport-A story
It wasn’t the crush, or a temptation. Her shape and bright color captivated me. But more than that, and deeper. The choice is already made. Discovered this the first time I lay eyes on my iMac.
What is this?
The sales guy gave me the info to back up my preference. The colors enchanted me and fueled mysterious passion. It was so hard to pick one. The Steve Jobs story of exile and come-back woke my asleep. The sudden reinvigorating of the market and turn of share. When I stood close that wind of change, stands my hair on end. I feel it blow. Right there in Best Buy, in the isle, next to the iMac display it blows.
Should have known by then, that choices click into place without explanation. Logic is not banished. It just lives in the other world. I invite her blindly back, slow, by comparing prices and waiting three days to bring my love home with me.
I wanted blueberry. Strawberry was the only refurbished model at Best Buy. That was back, way back before the Apple Store or the Apple Story. In the days of three-point-something-percent market share Apple. When Apple still allowed Best Buy to carry her precious babies. More than the sum of its parts, love at first sight, experienced not described. Love got me. A love story told me.
To compromise with my wallet, I bought a refurbished strawberry iMac rev C. It was three hundred dollars higher than a way-more-options PC, even so.
After I brought Strawberry ShortMac home, two sample chapters of a Steve Job’s story found me. Couldn’t afford the book. That was all I needed.
I received a blueberry printer cover in the mail after ordering a strawberry one from Epson. My taste for blueberry, satisfied. Having two printer covers is luxury endowed. What else can I upgrade with?
I download anything Mac compatible that did anything I might want, and didn’t have. install, try, it. The thing was a lemon. It had issues. I fixed it or called tech support, or both every week. Finally the tech support dude, asked me what I was doing to my computer. Strider wasn’t always there, but I always asked for him, cuz he led you through a Lord of the Rings quest as Malady till your iMac worked again. The guys back at support finally asked why I installed all those patches when the machine was working fine. They were mystified. I wasn’t satisfied.
The software it came with was all good but, I was swept away with upgrading. I wanted it to do things. To do something I didn’t know what, but it was irresistible, to try to find out. That and surfing the net. My computer is the bomb. I love it. I play Nanosaur and Bugdom. My kid and I bought Bugdom before it came with all rev D iMacs. Then, we upgraded Nanosaur.
Chat rooms I discovered are dangerous. After three days achat, I vow to never return.
I love iMac so much, sometimes I just stare at her.
When I sat and just look, at this pink form, noticing it, pink love and wavy feelings bubble up then spout like pink gold, Texas tea. I noticed this and sometimes just sat on the bed staring at my iMac for the joy of the delicious feelings that came up. She was my first computer. I’d been hurt-bored by the sea of old sandstone hardware. She though, is gleeful to behold.
Sometimes I’d look at other beautiful things. The angles of my rustic pinewood chair, just so in the light were I’d set it to sweep the dining nook. It’s beauty makes everything soft, the world shimmer. Swept air tastes me, time stands still, the feeling delivers me to the glory my iMac feels of. The floor is clean, a vast place to sit and be eternally swept away. So there I sit and let it. My iMac is happy. I’m happy, and there will there be upgrades for her, that really do stuff. The thought feels like a first encounter. Yes!
Again, pointless love at first sight thought. Feeling rushes crashes on me like the surf. New cool upgrades! I wonder what they will be. I sit in that meditation while a love for something that I want, that feels human, maps a place in me that has always been there. Steve Jobs and Apple are making something I can’t live without. When I checked out the newest stuff though, it was not there… There was noting I couldn’t live without. I was pretty happy with my Mac and printer, anyway.
This kept happening.
Meditation gets intense: iMac, Steve Jobs, Apple, making something for me surges up like candy ocean. When I stay there in the feeling intensity billows like clouds of light making it with lightning. They turn into a river of gratitude for this thing I want that Apple is making for me. It about bursts my chest, till I let it strike me, while I focus on Steve Jobs making this, and flow it to him. Then just like that chaos storm turns river. Washed through intense emotions of rushing light serene flowing, a delicious river in an artery of gratitude to the guy, who is making something for me.
Almost every time I meditate it happens. The feeling, this delight about the new something. It tumbles my feelings into explosive gratitude firing up water turbines, shooting a six-foot cable of light at me. I focus it on Steve Jobs and Apple. Like focusing on the feeling of being in love, with delicious electric current flowing fast as light yet still. A pre-emptive strike of ferocious gratitude. I sit with it till the fireworks turn off.
Multi-colored iMacs thrill me. I kept the folded pictures in my school bag. I can look at it when I want. Not because I need a new computer. The picture induces idolatrous transports like porn.
For a months this happened a few times a week. Then less. After a while I could look at my iMac and focus and nothing would happen.
Other things came up and turned into tornadoes and reflected different places. None felt like a heavenly river of light though. And every year even after the years of the experience dwindled, I’d check out what the hell I was expecting and still don’t find anything earthshaking at Apple.
Bought my second iMac. Nothing special Apple is making for me happened. She is my friend. And I figure she chose to come home with me. She and I bond and enjoy each others company. My new mac is my friend, too.
Then, last year, I got an android smart phone. Blasphemy. I wanted an iPhone. This phone fell into my lap just when I needed it bad and had no other way.
A few weeks later, I’m out with my phone in hand walking in a fascinating wood feeling connected to the world in a friendly intimate way by my phone. A whisper from the Earth’s every voice resonates low in me. Wonder strikes my inner, deeper echo place. Not lightning struck, voice of the world deep rock struck.
Oh, so this is it.
Hmmh no wonder!
It makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense!
Ha! This is what all that advance gratitude was about!
Oh, I love my android, and the World it holds in the webbed palm of my hand.
I love my friend, my phone. I smile when I think of Steve Jobs.
I never met, never saw him. Never wrote and mailed, or talked to him.
One day though, my heart broke in an instant as I raked last years leaves in midsummer Texas heat. Grief torrents and whips me like a blizzard without provocation. Sinking to a log on the ground I weep like a child. My parter thinks I’m crazy for suddenly putting down the rake in subdued grief. Sitting, there, I cry bitter tears for half an hour. Something about my iMac and a dear friend has died. I can’t explain it.
Next day I find out.
Eye response
Acceptance smile
Image moved
Pleased hunger
Receives again
Delicious Words
Feelings explode
Ideas gleam
Touch me more
To be enjoyed
The greatest gift
Enjoy you-
Communion
A City of Light
Star light rapids
Pillar of day
Water rafters
Sweep hearts clean
Hearts swept away
Ravished blood night
Unimagined communion
Daily Post Daily Prompt: City of Light:
National Poetry Writing Month:
NaPoWriMo: http://wp.me/pf2B5-48H
Rumors preceded him.
She sneaked out to check out the rumors.
This new preacher had it real.
He plants passion
She thought he was handsome.
She was nineteen.
He thirty-nine.
She was a belle at high school.
He had four wives.
She saw him float right off the floor, lifted up by light, knew she would marry him, the presence of some horror she never met, leered at her from the audience.
He moved the crowd left them swaying, went off to a meeting.
She followed him, got his attention, informed him she would be his wife.
He said when I came back to town.
He did. She was ready.
I am their tenth child, counting the ones who didn’t grow up.
They believed in me.
I was their purpose.
Conceived in a Mexican jail.
Born while he stood trial.
She sold my home to bribe the judge.
To give the world my little brothers.
Their purpose was their passion.
They weren’t right.
Yet, in some matters, the matters of their passion, what really matters, they were right on target.
Kids and grown ups feel the same being bullied.
Being bullied.
Becoming bullies back.
The good old USA declared open season on Mormons, by Congress jokes and bullying.
They were not allowed to marry whomever their passion dictated, from the beginning.
They weren’t.
History would have been different if they had been.
But that would make a boring story.
Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Odd Couple
You’ve being exiled to a private island, and your captors will only supply you with five foods. What do you pick?
I am vacationing on this private Earth island.
Been here for a while.
So far I have bought into the limited.
You will only supply me with five foods a day now will you?
Well that is not good enough. Not anymore.
I am not your captor.
Here is the list of what I am having:
All five food groups each for each of my five bodies every day
Cooked and served please
Spirit Body
Mind Body
Physical Body
Emotional Body
Body of Work
We want Five a Day!
We need Five a Day!
We get Five a Day!
Any Questions?
We take care of ourselves and each other.
No compromise.
Thank You for your kind support Facilitator.
Life is Good.
I’m so wanting to believe in people-including the weaker sex. The tits-bated weaker sex. The devoid of reason and control by tits, lured to their death by mermaids, trapable weaker sex. I’m wanting to believe they are not a mistake. Girls-next-door, church lady or stripper, it’s a continual, universal wonder. What’s up with men and tits, woman or whatever?
I’m wondering. Wondering and asking for four years now. I always get answers. So what then? What?
Looking at my breasts in the mirror, to me, is about as enchanting as looking at my hands without a manicure. At least done nails thrill me like adorable outfits. I love looking at my outfits, any outfits. Fashion, outfits, hair, makeup, yummy costumes captivate me, but not bare tits. Tits in lift up lace or leather? Hell yeah. It’s the leather. Trust me, it’s the design, the angles, the style shaped around the tits, tits in a bodice not tits themselves. For sure, not my pretty tits. Not mine, not anyone’s. But really, much less my own. Breasts are for decoration, as far as visual pleasure. That’s it for me.
Breasts and feminine beauty make me feel lovely and captivating when I see them. I never want to touch them. Except maybe out of curiosity, or the softness of the fabric they are tightly laced up in. When I see it, it makes me feel: That is for me! I am this beautiful. Same reason I love romances. It’s how it makes me feel about me. It’s about me. It’s how I feel romanced, loved, worshiped, adored. Tits have almost nothing to do with it, except the feeling seeing them gives me that mine are beautiful. That I am all this beautiful.
Men though, they go retarded instantly over any pair of tits.
Yeah, I don’t trust men.
There is just something sinister in their weakness for tits.
Not only chaste wifely woman think so.
Why do guys always try to get a twenty-dollar dance for ten?
Oh, I so hate that!
It’s so insulting.
I know. It’s belittling.
I just turn around and walk away. I won’t even deal with that kind of customer.
I know, it just brings you down. It devalues us as dancers.
Yeah, it makes me so mad. How would he feel it he wasn’t paid for his work? When ever I go for that stupid deal, I just feel not worth full price.
Yep, ruins your whole night. They keep insulting us with stupid offers.
Grabby guys and ten-dollar guys, the worst!
I don’t know, but what’s up with men in general?
A tits-switch flips their brain cells off.
Just like that. You can’t trust it.
I want to. But.
Oh, god, I know!
I buy into Michelle O’Donnell’s view that God or Allah, or Universal Evolutionary Impulse, or Whatever, did not make the obvious mistake. I mean didn’t make a mistake (even the obvious one) when men were created or wired or whatever, wrong. Wrong. A mistake. But Life doesn’t make mistakes so….?
I mean when I love someone, any other flexed biceps are irrelevant. There is actually only one man in the world. This wonderful utopia doesn’t seem to apply to men. Even when they sing about it, cuz it’s what the stronger sex wants to hear. Or something. I don’t get it.
This question had a lot of chances to be asked.
Wow, this guy is not asking me to have sex for money!
Wait, he is. Who or what do you think I am? Pause. I defer to the mind of “God” on this matter. I understand there is a bigger truth I do not see. I defiantly do not see it!. I trust men are created right, for a reason and not a mistake. Takes deep breath. Sighs. I need help.
No thanks for your kind offer. I dance. That’s all. I only dance and the laws apply.
The question burns like the bright incandescent lamp that always goes out.
My wtf idea of men, is not the truth about men. But I don’t know what the truth is. I really don’t. It’s super annoying.
No, you can’t touch.
Little Tommy, you can’t touch Little Betty that way…
But that day, that one day, everything changed.
It was a normal day. The ten dollars left in my left fitted jeans’ pocket feel good. I had paid my bills and paid off all that debt. I’m ten dollars ahead and ready to start saving. Yeah.
I’m in the zone dressing to go out running when a glance up at my topless reflection in the bedroom mirror captivates me.
I glance, in passing, in the mirror its my tits.
Those. Yes!
Tits! It’s a instinctual wild animal reaction. My whole body shouts out rippling joy. Joy’s crashing waves of smashing euphoria irresistible pleasure.
The mirror’s treasure, edible bliss! I must have. I must touch, now. Reaching where no does not exist. Water after dry days in desert intensity, this cool waterfall of deliciousness palm trees shade smiles all for me to swim in taste, feel with my whole body, tongue electrified, lightning stricken mind, on divine fire, missile target smitten emotions lunge at all this satisfaction just for me. For me!
Oh wait, I better something… as I leap, one arm reaching grasping for heaven, the other reaches for the bill in my pocket. Here! Take it! I must touch! It’s all I have! Take it, please!
If I had 500, I would say the same thing. Or a thousand. Or five thousand. Or whatever…
Then. My reflection is a reflection. I am myself again.
The earthshaking pleasure, in a river of chocolate I taste with every pore of my body, and the vast space of tasted mind, the ease the universal delight of dessert, tastable delights walking around everywhere in my whole world vanishes.
I don’t’ know how anyone can live, or not live, like that.
No words suffice for the world men live.
Goddam God! No mistake made! Question answered. Got it. Okay.
The intense rushing cascades of joy from just seeing and feeling, wanting to touch!
Never felt anything even remotely like it. There are no words. Nothing comes close. My emotions are just as intense and delightful, but its even the same taste bud. Indescribable heaven of physical desire.
I don’t even understand how men handle this so exceptionally well. I, I couldn’t handle it. I’d go around tasting everything, begging, borrowing and stealing, more, more! What a wonderful world! Wow God. You knew what you were doing. What a sexy world!
I understand now why a man would feel like he is hungry and being deprived of all this amazing food. It sits there wasted while he starves. He steals it, of course! What starved person wouldn’t. It’s stupid like: “A mans steals a loaf of bread and shit goes down.” I might even have just taken it in that moment. No handle on restraint, no practice, no understanding of the harm it could cause to the wonder of beauty dessert.
Hopefully “she” would have been a big enough slut to accept my ten.
Porque yo no respondo!
Because I can’t be held responsible for what I might have done!
…Men are intensely vulnerable, sweet and lucky.
Creation is fucking awesome.
Response to: WordPress
The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Trading Places
***
WordPress
The Daily Post
Weekly Photo Challenge”
Future Tense
://wp.me/p23sd-4pF
Remember when we were dumb?
Seven-year-olds looking back at being six.
Remember we thought we ‘d get lost if we walked over there behind those trees?
Yeah!
We were so dumb!
Remember when we were dumb?
We used to be so dumb. Every year. Then, the next year we were smart.
One of my sisters or I would inevitably pop the question. We laugh at our old dumb selves. Then start remembering something even dumber.
Remember when we used to fight for Roundy?
Yeah! That was so dumb!
No it wasn’t! Food actually tastes better when you eat it with the one-and-only round spoon!
Remember when Sandra decided to just keep the dang thing in her pocket all day? She could instantly win the fight to eat supper with Roundy?
Well that was smart. Till it fell out of her pocket into the outhouse.
Remember how mad I was at her? She was so dumb! I chased her all over to get her to stop and listen to how mad I was, and how dumb that was. When I caught her I punched her. Wow. She slapped me back. So I had to chase her to hit her back. I was so dumb!
We were thirteen when it dawned on us that we were always going to have been dumb.
What are we going to think is just dumb?
What are we going to know was really dumb?
What is gonna be really, really dumb and what will be, cringe, so, soooooo dumb?
Remember when we used to believe snakes and scorpions would chase you as soon as they look at you? Remember we used to practice out-running snakes?
Yeah!
Remember we thought scorpions were gonna be as big as squirrels. They were going to chase us with their stinging squirrel tails curled forward to jab us to death with that one deadly poison sting.
We were so dumb!
We could try to avoid some of those.
We tried.
It hasn’t worked.
I can still sit and ask my sisters this same question and get the same kind of answers. Still makes me cringe. Still embarrassing. Still unthinkable. Still nothing we can do about being so dumb.
Remember when we thought “bad people” were all going to hell?
Yeah, and we really felt dark skin was inferior, too.
Yeah. Don’t remind me!
Remember black people just were never going to add-up?
It’s to soon to remember that one. I don’t want to remember when we were dumb.
Well, we really did believe that.
I know we did! But it’s so embarrassing. I’d rather remember squirrel tailed scorpions. Remember we argued whether scorpions were furry like squirrels or reptilian like lizards?
Remember when I found a lizard that curled up it’s tail when it raced by? I ran like hell. It was a baby scorpion and had a momma scorpion, like a mamma bear, near by.
Yeah and I took you to find that lizard to prove that scorpions were lizardy not squirrelly. Remember we figured hunting a dragon. We crept into a dragon’s lair, over there between that cactus and those two bushes. Glad we practiced running like hell. This scorpion might attacked us.
I was so going to prove to you that scorpions were more dragon-lizard than vicious-squirrel. I had already practiced my acceptance speech.
Remember a tiny scorpion. The stare in disbelief at the puny thing after we shook, ran just from the name? Just a weird insect thingy. After we named it we ran for our lives. Deadly!
Remember we thought gay was an abomination, condemned?
Would you please shut up!
Remember when….
I’m not listening!
Okay remember when we puffed our bangs up into that big forward arch? Remember we thought that was tho only pretty way to do bangs?
I try not to!
Oh, but even worse, we thought there was one right way to heaven and we were on it. All ten of us, while everyone else was going to hell. That wasn’t the worst part though. Everyone else was going to hell unless we showed them the right way.
Yeah, okay, I remember, unfortunately… See ya the hell later. I’m getting out of here. Want anything from the store?
***
Judgement day sucks!
Judgement gained: Priceless!
In response to The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Judgement Day
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/daily-prompt-book-cover/
Competition focuses, reaches, catches, traps, evolves, gives, takes, glorifies, laughs. Competition is a god.
Competition is like love. I don’t want to give it up! Like love, competition puts the fun in everything. Competition makes games. Games make fun. Fun makes community.
Think, Olympics without competition.
Imagine only one football team.
Games, all about not winning?
Business, drooping like some Communism.
Events, not planed to out-do the one before.
Competition is god. Sometimes though, we stand up to god. We can pick how we want to worship. We get to say what games we want to play. Vote with our feet.
The game where a few smart and amazingly talented people beat the rest of the world at the Monopoly is not fun. The point of a game is fun right? Fun on both sides. When the game is over, it stops. Or when we say it’s over, it stops. It’s a game. We made the rules, remember?
Play a new game.
Tug of war is no longer fun when it’s people against a machine. Maybe this game got dropped from the Olympics for good reason.
Give us bread lest we die.
It’s that old story. Growing up I always thought the protagonists that the God in the Bible Stories helped were the good guys.
But Joseph Sold Into Egypt he was more like a Red Ocean dreamer of dreams. So, like Warren Buffet, he could tell what the economy was going to do. We get the story that his prognostication was fair and based on the weather. Maybe so. In that case, so is the economic climate: There was going to be an inflation then a drop. So he invested and bought up all the corn. Yeah, people ate nothing but corn.
Then when the Great Depression err famine came he did the usual.
The people spent all their money on food the first year of the seven-year famine, Great Depression.
Second and third years people traded their cattle for food.
Next years their land.
Then the clincher: Give us bread else we die!
So, our righteous Joseph-Sold-into-Egypt accepted the lives of everyone in the kingdom in exchange for feeding them. Viola!
He was the king’s deputy. Kings are servants of their people. Not the other way around. They got their jobs backwards.
I don’t know if a God did or didn’t give him the heads up or the vision of patterns and the wisdom to save the world from starvation. Enslaving everyone was not necessary, though. Or was it? It was four hundred years later that, well surprise, Joseph’s own descendants are enslaved to the system that he started when he might have just served.
They wanted out of slavery and vicious miracles got them out in our Exodus Bible story.
Key to being enslaved is both sides play the game.
Oh, so you want just you and the Pharaoh to be left alive then?
You lose us, you lose your kingdom. Ayn Rand glorifies this outcome. In her popular novel Atlas Shrugged, just a Pharaoh and a Joseph and a mighty girl are left after they didn’t help the people. Try and get dumber than that. No one else was worth it. Some folks do seem to think that is a great story. (Note: I was one of them. People change.)
“Give us liberty or give us death!”
It’s just an attitude, as opposed to:
“Give us bread else we die!”
People are more important than game rules. Rules and games are for people. People matter. Public servants are for people. Smart ones are great gifts to all of us. Smart people matter just as much as not-smart-in-that-way, people.
Joseph and Warren Buffet can serve and care and offer their gifts how their hearts desire.
We have hearts, too. We can dictate what we experience and believe by consciously making choices.
We don’t have to sacrifice liberty to live. We don’t have to kill anyone, or die.
My childhood hero Joseph Sold into Egypt no longer impresses me.
Re-living re-rewriting this same story now.
Heroes, step up.
In response to WordPress The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Competition
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/daily-prompt-competition/
Wahhhhhhh!
Do I have to leave sweet the comfort of kinder-ignorance?
Wanna fight?
Okay…
Then,
Step one:
Re-blog.
Misery loves company.
For community exposure, familiarity and support.
Wishing I could just reblog everything else I don’t want to confront.
Step two:
Close eyes and forget about this.
Remember this is how you felt about SEO, trapped- handles out of reach. Now SEO had become a fabulous fun rewarding puzzle. No relation to this though.
Crediting photos: paperwork, work, hard, confusing, law-needs a lawyer… It will never be fun like SEO is!…
Crediting Fotos, you suck!
…Might want my work credited though..
That would be awesome!
your thoughts here… (optional)
The state of My state, dictates my state, and how I relate to my State.
State of mind
Emotional state
State of home
Writing states
My spirit’s state
Physical state I’m in
The state my game got at
State of my friendship hat
State of my kin
State of the light in her eye
State of my garden wars
State of my inner horse
Blogs injected states
State of traffic
State at work at play
Cuddled with deadly State
Smiling Wild State
Stating in the Union
Of Texas State
Anonymous state of disunion
State of all States
State of communion
State of every World
State this Web of Light reflects
My statement
Inner State
Daily Post
Weekly Writing Challenge:
State of my State
One thin slice of Idyllic
Whole when each shares hers
This is impossible
Possible, what I experience
Experience, what I want
***
Response to:
WordPress Daily Post
Daily Prompt:
Idyllic
Try it here:
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/daily-prompt-idyllic/
Flavor is in relationship. Yummy people! Tasty things. Breathable feelings.
Flavor is a recipe. Subtle spice, people salt, texture things, color mixed, just so original ingredients, design place flavor.
The usual staple ingredients are pretty much the same everywhere. It’s the details that delight you. The details of landscape, story, living things.
The flavor of a place.
Local flavor is song of people in their happy places, letting bees buzz.
I keep Austin weird. Enough of us do to cook Austin a creative wild dish for the world to taste once and want to stay.
Places have unique flavor color weirdness.
Same with sideways people.
Sideways traditions.
As weird as you really are.
In response to WordPress
The Daily Post.
Daily Prompt: Local Flavor
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/daily-prompt-local-flavor/
Tosh was like that. Her voice electrified empowered, drove like a wireless tool.
You guys are getting out of here, now. Her tone is final. Get your asses out! You will never come back here again.
It came to this. A long whispered navigation through our non-options, huddled in the visiting room hoping it wasn’t being recorded.
You have to get out of here. You know it. Her voice went down instead of up. You will disappear.
Goodbye good luck and good riddance.
We knew she meant the situation, not us. We huddled and hugged. I don’t know how, but you are going to do it. I am willing it. So, you know it will happen.
It started to happen. We did our best. Now, instead of visiting her in Tuiles County Jail again this weekend, we are stranded. Stranded on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales with no money, no gas, not a crumb of smuggled food left. It’s hot, hungry, scary as thirsty hell. No friend, no place to show up. Not even to park. No gas to go on. Nowhere to sleep after two bat flying nights and bleary eyed days without a stop on the oil dripped road. Except to pee re-oil.
We were six. All under seventeen. All running away from different foster homes in Salt Lake City. All crammed into the belly of the beast, taking turns driving. I am fifteen, but my twelve-year-old brother drives my turn. I just prayed and shook, shook and prayed. They drove the thousand miles to the freedom of the Mexican border.
We got across it too, with just a social security card.
Mexican delightful air feels free light, a breathable shout of joy. The morbid weight of being caught, taken back to testify again vanishes. I’m too tired to shout, so I skip a little, smiling with my whole body. When I look around, five others had the same relived triamph glow on their faces. The air in Mexico tastes good. But it is hungry air, going nowhere.
Gas should have run out near Flagstaff, by Estephania’s summer school mile-per-gallon calculations. That was hundreds of miles ago.
We hadn’t expected to eat. Who knew. This car hadn’t been pillaged yet. Estephania secretly bought this beast three days ago with school clothes money. We stole licence plates for it off a same looking abandoned, sorta, car. Then kidnapped our younger brothers. They searched my little brothers, did, and scored 50 cents from between the seats. So from nothing we went to having a whole kilo of fresh tortillas from a Tortilleria. The best tortillas I ever remember smelling tasting, slow chewing. The only thing left from the picnic basket was salt. We didn’t even dream of butter. Okay, we did, but salt was still perfect.
Pulling over out of town parking and sleeping on the ground for two days didn’t improve our mood. The boys found water. That improved our survival.
I found acorns in the leaves we laid on. If you can stand the bitter, and focus on gathering and cracking little handfuls, you don’t have to stay hungry, a germ at a time. But I was still so hungry from not wanting to do that and the bitter was worse than hunger. Fasting is at least worth something.
So, I am fasting. Pretending I am fasting. Way to bitter not to. Finding a way to survive in the wilderness had been on my bucket list. Check.
We will survive! We will make it back home to the kids.
But shit! We need a better plan.
None came. Every possible one failed depressing us more every time we talked.
Two edgy sweat-filled ravenous days drowning in knowing we couldn’t go forward jackhammered the resolve in our eyes. But it didn’t move the picture of resolve in Tosh’s eyes from our inner eyes.
That last night driving to the border knowing gas would run out any second was war. The invisible enemy guns aimed at us. Ambush any second. We would be caught and skinned. Being caught, just the thought, made my stomach fall into the bottomless pit where my heart was.
All it would take is one cop to look twice. Out of gas and no way to buy any was a ticket straight back to foster homes. We wouldn’t see Tosh either, then. After all Sgt. Vogtechy wouldn’t bother to drive six of us all day to see our sister once a week, again after this, would he? Now we ran. The hollow spirit creeps of murdered eye sparkle, sucked at my soul. Life would suck unimaginably worse than before if we were caught and taken back there again. We would be caught prison escapees. Cruel. Punishing. Looks.
Besides we would have failed. Failed. So, so much worse! The wrath of God was supposed to be worse, but wrath of my foster parents totally trips me.
I feared the betrayal in their eyes. In hers it wold be shooting aimed fire. Withering. I know it’s there. They won’t understand. Can’t explain it. Those looks I sense drive me mad. Mad!
Betrayal is in his eyes. That I dare not even imagine. I can’t be thinking of it now, it drives a tornado ice drill. So I don’t. His eyes, hurt more than hers in wherever something I don’t understand.
Nothing to do.
Drive to where the gas will take us.
It takes us to the Judicial checkpoint outside Nogales. They won’t let us by.
Vayanse! Get out of here. You can’t come through.
Nowhere to go. The relief from being out of the USA is tangible. None of us is willing to go one inch closer to that place by turning around and driving back.
You kids aren’t either Mexicans.
Show me your papers.
The car’s got no papers either?
Go back were you came from or we are going to have to confiscate your car. It’s not ever your car is it?
We looked at him shrugging with our eyes. Looked at each other. We know judiciales pick and choose what they confiscate. This old four door green dinosaur Ford wouldn’t make the cut. We are embarrassed driving it. Though just then, we were beyond all embarrassment. Unmoved, we just sit there. He just stood there. Crossed his arms. Fidgeted. Walked away. Came back.
You guys are not getting by. Please leave. Now.
We didn’t. He hurried off to check out new arrivals.
We are frozen. In limbo too exhausted to move. We sat there indefinitely.
Quitense! Get out of the way! Other people want to get through.
We pulled the car to the side. Nothing else came to mind. Nowhere to go. Stunned we sat staring straight ahead staying out of each others fried terrified thoughts.
I need help! We need help! Falling falling into the well, down down were my heart is in the pit. I give up, whatever this is. God You gotta handle this!
The dust doesn’t settle. We do, right out of the way, on the side of the road next to the through lanes. We parked and stayed.
We just stayed there.
Then a surreal crazy man in a judicial uniform burst out of the dust and sun and silence.
Vayanse! Vayanse ninos!
A frustrated Judicial was waving his arms shouting. Get out of here kids! Just get the hell out of here! This time, he was waving us forward.
We drove on.
No gas. No money. A few hundred miles through the desert to Caborca.
We drove.
Dreams have no choice but to come true!
What would you do if you were a dream?
Why not just suck out all the money? Everyone is creepy oblivious. It’s simple, easy and just a mater of tweaks and time. The law is on my side. Besides it’s a big fun risky game of Monopoly. Not like there is anyone who can play against me. It’s boring when you don’t have a nemesis!
I turn evil and do LeClown wicked when I can’t take it like that anymore.
If I were a money mastermind, though, I would have to answer the question to myself, for myself.
Who or what would be my Lady Godiva?
ITNJs, two percent of the population? That’s it? We are rare awesomeness! Each with magnified unique gifts, too.
No wonder…on the grandiosity issues. How do you feel when you figure out you have this crazy super power? No one would believe this!…Till you show them like Steve and Warren and Aaron.
How the hell are we supposed to meet each other when we are so few and all hiding out with our extraordinary, opposite gifts?
Oh, yeah, intuition and serendipity…Can you consciously count on destiny and “divine intervention” when you are totally logical? The two don’t mix here.
Must be why we are misfits, not-well-adjusted, misunderstood, gone evil, so often.
What does it take to intervene for would-be-evil-masterminds before our gifts rot from un-acknowledge, misuse, misdirect, too-avant-garde-reject?
Irresistible game, that money one. If I could see money-flow patterns like I see other patterns, I would need to do something with it, like Warren does. I would need a Lady Godiva to help me answer my question about it, too.
If I can’t find an outlet for my genius, something that matters to serve, I will turn evil. I will play. Or I’ll just kill myself, like Aaron. Or kill other people, or systems. I am dangerous or a super hero. I am a mastermind.
What inspires me to help the 98% when I decide my goal?
I will play you my 98%. I will play you some way.
It’s not like I have a choice. It’s the game fire in my heart. I have to find it and keep it burning, like Mary Lou Retton said, or go mad.
My dad was an evil mastermind. I am a mastermind. It’s up to my environment whether I turn evil or serve daring greatly. I think it was sorta up to his, too. We all have a choice, yes. Dumb people make that choice lean pretty steep toward evil for a rejected superhero. The story and interpretation matters, too.
Either that or he was Lucifer’s immaculate conception. Makes me one-third daemon.
Thanks dad for the genes. Thanks everyone else who “knows” my dad is evil for the daemon part.
And if you don’t understand. You try on being Hitler’s kid for five minutes.
Who’s your daddy?
Adolph Hitler.
___________!!!
Really. Try it.
Being Ervil LeBaron’s daughter, that’s what it fucking feels like. Well it did. Till I realized: If he is Darth Vadar, I am Princess Leia. The probability of my turning evil greatly decreased with this story. Beware anyway.
The funnest part of being Ervil LeBaron’s kid though, and no amount of explanation or Luke Skywalkering changes it, is that half of my brother’s and sisters are in prison, or mental hospitals. Did I mention evil?
Weird that those of us who are not institutionalized are rocking the world with awesome innovation, leadership, character, technology, art, emotional work, vulnerability, love and daring.
Except me. I’m the one who lost the rat race. Too introverted, intuitive, thinking judgement all to an autistic degree, and way to into stuff, way to far, way to long before it trends, to be useful.
So, I figure something is a little off in the system. I love the system and my family and people, yet we are all still off. You know, the usual. Everyone and everything is off. Off, sick, painful and lovable.
Just like our evil masterminds. Just like me.
I am the 98% to other evil masterminds.
So, Ninety-Eight Percent, we create our own leaders. We focus our own genius mastermind’s hearts.
Lets get better at it. Blaming whoever we give away our power to when shit happens or shit doesn’t is fishy and fail.
We masterminds are at your service.
Getting everyone out of messes like all the bad things going on in our world, piece of cake to us. Impossible to you.
We want and need understanding, respect and honor just like anyone else, no matter how much money power or whatever pattern we master. Serving thrills us like it thrills you. We value meaning like everyone else.
We will play.
Might as well charm us into playing with you, for you.
Or we will rot, die, or be charmed tricked or tempted into playing against you, or killing you. There are lots of ways.
When you need the one of us who is the Jaws Of Life, you don’t have her. You have imprisoned her and rusted your own precious tool.
Now, she can’t help you. You get to watch people explode, bleed to death.
Note: Society’s best mastermind tool X Men solutions are likely in prison or mental institutions, homeless, starving artists, or sliding there now.
The solution is always found inside the problem.
Yeah, I know. This topic is not trending yet.
It will.
You are ahead of the game now, weather 98% or 2%.
Link to INTJ definition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTJ
INTJs are one of the rarest of the sixteen personality types, and account for about 1–4% of the population.[2][3]
INTJ (introversion, intuition, thinking, judgment) is an abbreviation used in the publications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI) to refer to one of the sixteen personality types.[1]
This article is about the Myers-Briggs personality type. For the Socionics INTj, see Logical Intuitive Introvert.
She pets me
She is my pet
Sometimes we go to sea
I through her
She lives in me
Manager sent:
Her text pict went wherever texts go when not instantaneously delivered.
Thought it was my alarm at 2 am.
Snapped out of exhaustion into alarm-focussed-sleep-attention.
It was this note posted at work.
Best text ever!
-Slept till now.
Daily Post Wring Challenge: 2AM Photo:http://wp.me/p23sd-4le
It’s super cool to stomp away from stupid people who are too pea-brained to see the truth. Then show up among people of inconsequence where we are gonna get it right. Just watch us!
It’s awesome and miraculous to flee the slavery of Egypt into the Promised Land, then show them we can do better as we wipe out all the people of no consequence occupying the lands we have promissory notes to. We are gonna get it right.
You know, flee religious persecution in the Old World and come to the New World where there are no people of consequence, and show them back home we can get it right. Just like this.
Flee German slaughter into ancestral land strewn with people of no consequence, and no promise, and show them Germans that we don’t treat people like that. We can get it right, just like this.
We flee United States persecution into the wilderness of Utah among an uncivilized people we bring consequence to, where us truth-bearing Mormons are gonna get it right. Just watch us.
We escape the persecution of the gone astray Mormon church into the Promised Land of Mexico among a lost and fallen people, were we are gonna get it right. We are getting these bloody drug wars right. Just watch us!
Flee the zombie hordes of corporate America, of this corrupt government, into survival mode, and watch the thing go up in smoke. We have miraculously escaped. We are gonna get it right this time. Watch us.
I hate my fail parents. I’m gonna get the hell out of here and get it right! Seriously, just watch!
It’s the Pharaohs’ fault.
It’s the kings’ fault.
It’s President Van Buren’s fault.
It’s the new president of the Mormon churches’ fault.
It’s Hitler’s fault. It’s Hitler’s fault, again.
It’s corporate greed and the system’s fault.
It’s _________’s fault!
It’s all my idiot parent’s and family’s stupid fault.
While here in my tiny all-encompassing world, it is ALL evil monster Ervil LeBaron’s fault. The bastard!
But, I’m gonna get it right this time. Just you watch me!
This is how I really feel:
***
Response to WrodPress
The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Bone of Contention
Wiped this off a tunnel under Mopac at Duval.
It took some of my perfect angle shot.
The Wondering Way of the Way
As I read this, I hear the voice inside my head reading this.
Hello Voice.
As I read, I hear you reading.
When I notice.
Why are you an abstraction?
Oh!
Hello Abstract Me.
A way to create new worlds
Stranger than fiction.
True of this tribe.
My tribe.
Now, we will get to make sweet bread! We hadn’t tasted it in months.
We just finished building that oven. We showcased ourselves, dirty hands and triumph, instead of showcasing it. Round top peeps up in the back.
Our own wood-burning adobe plastered oven, like the pioneers-that we were.
Boy did that oven deliver!
That’s me up front with the light-colored flowered blouse, bowl haircut.
A perfect goal-oriented-working-day in my favorite blouse. Favorite, yes favorite with orange and yellow flowers. Plus, the sleeves aren’t to long or two short. They are medium size. Like me.
Totally didn’t expext my best bluse to never look good and feel favorite again after that perfect day.
That day, I didn’t have to do 20 People’s dishes-three times.
I could fly!
Hadn’t seen this picture in thirty years.
Then, last year, our long-lost, very lost, friend posted it on Facebook.
Lots of stranger than fiction under the bridge since then!
Just saying.
Lovers, mothers
Newborns and strong men
Once doing
Alive in grass
Leaves of Grass spell is cast
When it takes in me, takes in you
Grass leaves, grass roots
Between fiction, and existence
Components of real from elusive unimaginable
Crafting reality vocation
Shaped with tools
Reshape it
With a wolf
How can I monetize this?
This is the only valid question right?
I rarely write personal posts but I just read about something at Kerry Dwyer’s blog site that reminded me of something that changed my life, something I wanted to share, the power of touch.
While in grad school at UCLA, I had a clinical rotation at a VA outpatient hospital, when a homeless man was brought in to the emergency room. He was filthy with a foul odor, as if he hadn’t changed his clothes in days nor took them off to go to the bathroom. I saw him come with the paramedics and the commotion that ensued with a lull before anyone started treatment, to gown and glove up, goggles over eyes, all body parts covered. The swarm of doctors and nurses began working on him as I made my way over to what looked like a great teaching experience I didn’t want to miss out on. When one…
View original post 511 more words
Love it when someone else does the writing heavy lifting! Strong guy here.
Taking the day off. : )
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble, it’s the things we do know that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain
Some (very reputable) psychologists are absolutely convinced that DNA is destiny. Other (very reputable) psychologists are convinced that your personality is shaped by what happens to you as an infant – or perhaps even in the first few minutes of life. This is what I love about psychology: the theories are all over the map and yet somehow everyone is still credible.
One very interesting dimension to personality has to do with the stories that we tell ourselves. Research has increasingly revealed that our personal life stories – our mental self-narratives – contribute substantially to our personalities and behaviors. An excellent New York Times article from 2007 summarizes much of this current research.
As the interpreter of our world, the mind is very…
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Fist, you are a horrible human being-a monster.
Everyone thinks so. Everyone who doesn’t know you.
When we the people get our hands on you it will hurt. We will make you a scandal, an outcast. We will humiliate you with accusations, gossip, tabloids, trial, jail, hopefully death. We laugh. There is no way out of it for you. We are right and we know it.
So, betray your families. Let us make your kids the children of monsters. We will make them orphans. You did it to us. We are justified. We want to turn your loves, your wives, into prison widows. We want to cause you pain. We want to watch. We are right.
Why don’t you see justice?
Why are you fighting back?
We are right!
It looked like he came out a gate. He may have come from behind. He is looking away as he walks away from the fence, Eva’s fence. Vague perplexed twitches scratch my mind. Did he come from her yard or something? Or was that not a side gate closing? He doesn’t even turn to look at us when we pull up in front of this house. Or was he just walking from the field behind her house?
I have never been here. Just now I drove up for the first time. My sister Gaby has, and was having trouble remembering which house is Eva’s. Oh, it’s that one! We were half past it when I pull over and parked. I’m too done driving to put the car in reverse and back up a few feet and park directly in front of the house. I just idle the car waiting for Gaby to insist, or I’m not re-parking. She doesn’t insist. So, I turn the car off.
We are way passed the driveway. Our car is parked half way between what is supposed to be Eva’s house and the next house on a quiet Phoenix col-de-sac. If Gaby is right, our old best friend Eva lives here with her three-year old daughter I can’t wait to meet, and her boyfriend I haven’t met yet either.
Are you sure this is Eva’s house?
Yeah, now I’m totally sure.
Is that her boyfriend, then? I nod in the direction of the man crossing the narrow side yard between the house and the construction site next door.
Gaby turns and stares in his direction. He reaches the construction cluttered next door front yard, bends over and picks up a bucket. His back is to us. He walks a few feet, puts the bucket down, turns and picks up the garden hose, then walks a bit further and puts it down, then reaches for a shovel.
No! He is way to old to be Eva’s boyfriend.
Well it looked like he was coming out of her fence. But I’m not sure. Maybe he wasn’t.
I don’t know what he is doing, but that is not Eva’s boyfriend. Why would you even think that?
I don’t know. Maybe she hired him to work on something. What if he is a friend of her dads or something? He could have come from behind the house, I couldn’t tell for sure.
I watch him, perplexed. He stands the shovel against the wall by the front door, picks up a brick from there, and puts the brick where he got the hose from.
First I’m wondering who he is. Now I’m wondering what he is doing. He seems busy and focused. His feverish work keeps his face turned away from us. If he was working for Eva, unless he is real shy, he would have wondered about us by now, maybe said hi, and figured out who we are. He must be shy or obsessed or something.
But he would have expected us, if he knew Eva. She would have told us if he would be working on something when we are showing up.
Even shy people notice a car drive up, and woman in it. Not a glance though.
Gaby is getting her things, cleaning up, folding sweaters, bagging up food wrappers and Starbucks cups. She tosses the pillows into the back seat and reaches back for her overnight bag. I turn the music down.
You go on in. I’ll come in after a while.
The truth is, I just can’t move. I need stillness. This happens sometimes.
It’s about ten in the morning, we drove all night expecting to arrive sooner, before Eva left for work. Traffic held us up after we did a circle around Sky Harbor. Eva isn’t home now, so rushing in won’t make me see her any sooner, anyway. I must sit here, breath, relax.
One thing I love about Gaby is she gets me. I don’t have to explain why I just sit here. I don’t help put CD’s away or straighten up or fold the lap blanket, or tell my daughter to get her things. I turn off the music.
Gaby looks around. Maybe we should tell Eva.
I think so. I nod.
I zone out. Gaby doesn’t disturb me.
I don’t see what the guy is working at. The hose doesn’t go into the bucket, or on a pile of cement to water and mix. He doesn’t turn it on. He doesn’t follow-up with a next logical step. The next, brick he picks up, he puts down next to a half-empty sack of cement. When he takes the rake from one spot on the ground and puts it down at another random spot on the ground, an uncomfortable feeling crescendos in bewildered, silent questioning.
What is going on!?
Sitting there uneasy, wondering, dazed, zoned, empty, time stands still.
A silent flash of nothing mixes with the nothing in me. It forms something. Not thought or words or even a feeling. It is an absolute, a knowing, an imperative, a command, no voice. Word-thought shaped of unquestionable authority that is not mine, booms in a still unheard un-voiced statement of fact.
“She is mine.
You can’t touch her!
She is mine.
Because I love her.”
I don’t know what stated this. It felt exactly like my feelings, but it wasn’t me. I just totally agree, because I do, and don’t know why, except that of course, it’s just what I would have said if I had thought of it, and knew why I’d thought of it. But I didn’t, and I didn’t.
But, then, it strikes me to add:
Not her, not anyone!
Then nothing. A sense completion, followed by a sense of peace.
My job here is done. It is a feeling, a certainty that came with this mystery. I have nothing else to do here, but don’t know how to say it, or even think it.
You can say or do what you think is right, Gaby. Whatever you think needs to be said to Eva or done, you do it. I’m not going to do anything.
The guy, when I notice again, has gotten on a bike. He rides past us with his face turned away staring, eagerly searching, it would seem, for something amazing across the street.
I can move now. Then no further thought. I forget about the whole thing. We all get up and go inside to shower, sleep and wait for Eva.
While Eva gets dinner, that evening, I play in the back yard with our kids. Our ball hits the gate. I look at it. It is unlatched. I latch it.
When we go inside I remember. The side gate was not latched, Eva. Now it’s latched.
It was unlatched? It couldn’t have been. Maybe…, she seems suddenly exasperated, well I don’t know how, I better double check after some people come over.
I don’t think of any related incident or anything else to say about it, while she seems frustrated with her beloved suspect.
Gaby forgot about the whole thing, too.
We all had a great time together, for a couple of days then we got back on the road.
After a few weeks when we were back home, Eva called Gaby frantic and terrified, sobbing.
The police had pounded on her door, urgently showed their badges and ordered:
Get your purse and your kid right now. You have to get out of here. We can no longer ensure your safety. Don’t come back here under any circumstances. You can arrange for someone to pick-up your things later.
We leave right now.
You know the Bicycle Stalker?
Yeah, of course.
He has now been identified. He is in your area. You and your daughter fit the profile.
While she looked down, I stared. Every time she was this close since that first day, my hand always almost reaches to touch. My hand wants to, besides my wanting to. Curiosity and that feeling of touching soft, of touching mystery is too much this time. I figure she won’t notice. I’ll barely touch, and she won’t even feel it. Then, I won’t have to ask. I don’t know what she would say if I asked. She might get mad. She might not like me anymore. She is my teacher. I want her to like me. I like her.
My fingers reach and touch her hair. She does notice. She doesn’t seem mad, or surprised. Her hair is soft and fuzzy in a big roundness and it doesn’t move like all the other hair I’ve ever seen does. It looks soft and feels fluffy and spongy. I hadn’t been sure it was hair. I still am not sure, but I think it is. I don’t know how she gets it like that.
She used to be strange when I first came to school, before she was Ms Andrason. Her face is wide and round, with a flat wide nose. She looked like people I know in Mexico, except they all had dark skin and I expected them to look like that. Her lips are thick, too. She seems so different from all the other normal people I know. Her skin is whiter, but she looks more Mexican than Mexicans. Then, she has that fluffy round hair. Now she is Ms Andrason and I wouldn’t like at all if she looked any different.
The kids that she had in kindergarten like her, too. She lets them wrap their arms around her waist or leg and hang there, swinging like babies. She wraps her arms around them back. Sometimes she leans to put her arms around the kids who put their arms around her. I want to be like that, too, but I didn’t go to kindergarten. And I don’t want to be a baby. I’m not a kindergarten baby. So, I told the kids singing:
“Kindergarten baby
Born in the navy
Eating butter and gravy”,
I’m clean. I never got contaminated by kindergarten. Now, I’m lucky I didn’t go.
Ms Andrason doesn’t know me like she knows them, though. I can’t think of any excuse that doesn’t terrify me, to stand close to her like they do, and be a favorite. I don’t feel like I’m not her favorite. I just want to be her most favorite. She doesn’t have one yet. I’m going to be right there next to her with the same reasons they have to be there and for her to remember things with me, the way they do.
When she calls to line up I am the first. Well, except those times I was flying so high on the half-moon seesaw with Courtney. We would be friends forever flying off our seats, white-knuckle holding on, shrieking wild terrified delight.
I ignored her calling everyone to line up. She frowned. My heart sank. Courtney seemed not to notice. Something in her voice told me I could still be her favorite anyway, though. Courtney And I couldn’t wait for recess again. We wouldn’t stop breathless whispering in line. So, that time, well, I whispered in line and, didn’t try to please her at all.
Next recess Courtney is playing with Casey on the seesaw.
I don’t play with girls. His voice was steady and certain. It is a fact, by his voice. I never have. I never will.
Casey is the handsomest boy I have ever seen. I never talk to him. I might smile, or cry, or smile crying. I rush away. Watching them on the seesaw from behind the bushes bores me. Their butts stay in the seat. Courtney searches the playground till he sees me in the bushes. He looks at me bored from slow in the air. He looks away on his way down, then gets off.
It’s easier to mind Ms Andrason, again, so I do every day. I watch for when she reaches for her whistle. Before she blows it, I rush to line up. Sometimes I line up when I think she is going to reach for it. She doesn’t. I pretend to be playing just there, by myself.
I’m like a stone in line. The girls giggle. I’m a rock. Boys and girls chase each other around in the line. I’m still as a tree. They run around me. Ms Andrason notices I don’t play in line. I stay quiet when we file into the classroom. No one else notices me.
Okay, Marcy does notice me, but then she puts on her swagger and walks away. She has this walk. She walks like she would never fall off the seesaw no matter how high she flew.
The way she moves her shoulders and sways her hips in a stomping sorta way makes me think she is like a boy. She would be fun to play with, but she doesn’t want to reel on the seesaw with me.
We could touch the sky!
Her indifference is not an ooh-hoo indifference. She is not scared or fragile or wearing a dress or might hurt her fingers or lose a barrette, miss an earring. So I figure she only likes bigger ones. Bigger seesaws or Disney Land or something worldly like that, maybe even real horses. Horses are not worldly though. Well, I ride horses, too. I got to in Veracruz when we lived there. But she doesn’t talk about it. So, I guess she has been all over and done all the fun stuff. She wants to talk about something else, now.
No one else knows about what I like to talk about, so I don’t talk to anyone. She seems more lost and frustrated than haughty. I know how she feels.
I bet you don’t know either.
I bet I do.
I bet you don’t.
What then? I challenge her. Nothing she can say will be anything I don’t know.
Computer.
What?
Computers!
See, you don’t know.
She tells me it is a thing that does things. And you make it do things.
A toy?
No. Way better than a toy.
But nothing is better than a toy. And her thing is weird and doesn’t make sense.
I do know, but I think it’s boring.
Know you don’t either know. I don’t have one, but I want one. And, I’m going to help my brother and my dad work on them till we make one. I’ll know all about it by then. But you don’t know what I’m talking about or believe me either.
Why would she ever choose whatever that boring thing is instead of seesaws, horses and fun toys? So, she has all the horses and seesaws she wants, but she wants that whatever thing, obviously dumb and boring, or I would know about it.
Yes I do, I just don’t want to talk about it.
No you don’t. No one else does either. She gives me a frustrated defiant head shake, turns around and swagger off. I love watching her saunter with her straight blonde hair swinging back and forth like a boy’s would if it were down to his shoulders. But boy’s hair never is.
She is such a waste of fun. But I like her anyway, even if we don’t talk about anything.
It’s story time. I’m wondering if I can sit next to Ms Andrason and try to touch her hair again.
Who would like me to read their library book for story time today?
Oh, you can read mine, Ms Andrason.
Then everybody else says. Mine, mine. You can read mine.
My book though, is the best one.
For sure Ms Andrason will be able to tell my library book is the best. But she still tells the class:
Anyone who wants to share their book can go quietly to their desk and get it. Then come and sit back down in the circle.
I went as fast as I could to be back and sit next to Ms Andrason. But one of the boys had just scooted over closer to her. Marcy didn’t get up and get a book to share. There is a place to sit right there next to her, now. My hair plan is gone, so I plop down in the new best spot, and the best part is she doesn’t know I want to sit next to her.
For sure Ms Andrason will see my library book is the best.
But Miss Andrason didn’t. For some reason, she couldn’t just tell my book was the best. I don’t know why. She looked at everyone’s books. I thought she was just being nice to them, like my mom giving everyone else a chance to answer the quiz question before she asked it to me. But then she didn’t pick mine anyway. Mine is the best. I can tell by the pictures-bright sweeping fast furious, adventure pictures. A girl and her horse, robbers, fast river, friendly horse rescuing her best girl, races, treasure, daring escapes, first prize.
You will each get a turn to tell everyone about your book.
I can hardly hear boys and girls showing their books and telling why they chose it, while I’m comparing the fist thing they say and the front cover, to all of how better mine is than that.
What an interesting story.
That’s a nice story you chose.
Such a sweet kitten on the cover. Is that why you chose it?
I can’t make up my mind. They are all such good stories. She smiles around at us.
She is just going to pick mine, for sure when it’s Jennifer’s turn. She’s a no fun ooh-hoo girl who giggles and whispers with a group of other ooh-hoo girls on the playground. Recognizing her now smart voice suggesting a really ooh-hoo unexciting story about some boring stuffed rabbit, shocks me. That is not her usual voice. She knows what she is talking about. It’s a dumb book though. Nothing fun happens in that dumb kind of story. Her voice, and the way she talks about a dull rabbit is like she knows. Like she knows what she is talking about.
You like horses don’t you? She is suddenly looking at me.
I nod wildly. I don’t know why I’m nodding, because, obviously, these are the best thing to like, and I do-of-course. Not liking horses or not riding the flying-off-the-seesaw-bucking bronco, that would be the wonder. Some people just are dumb. But Miss Andrason isn’t. So, I know she will pick the best book-mine, though not a word that sounds how good this book is, comes out. All its glory gets stuck in my throat. She doesn’t know mine is the best.
All of your books sound great. It’s so hard to pick one. Let me see.
Read this one! Read mine! Read….! Book names and hands go up, then wave in the air. We get louder and louder in fast controlled waves of excitement. Then it gets out of control. No, all of our books aren’t great, mine is the best is all I feel.
It feels suddenly, just like raising my hand to answer mom’s quiz questions at home. Mom finally picks me when I get loud enough to show her I know the answer to the Bible Story quiz for sure. Sometimes it seems like she can’t tell. She picks everyone else first. The more they guess, and don’t know, the more frenzied I get trying to contain it.
Miss Andrason winces. Quiet please!
She looks at me, reproving, when she says it. I’d hopped up off the floor shaking my book as high in the air, above my head as I could like a trophy, while jumping up and down shouting: Mine! Mine! Mine! Because I don’t know the name of my book.
I feel shrunken by her glance. I never want her to glance hurt or something, at me like that ever again.
Jennifer raises her hand politely. Ms Andrason. Why don’t you try eeney meeney miney moe?
I think that is a good idea. Thank you. Let’s do that.
I’m really wishing I would have suggested that good idea. I’m going to be smart and helpful faster next time.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers let him go
Eenie meenie miney moe.
I know instantly what needs fixing. My hand shoots up.
Marcy’s hand goes up, too.
I can hardly wait to get this straight, but then Ms Andrason calls on her, not me.
Ms Andrason. Why don’t you say nigger?
I almost shout: That is just what I was going to say! Someone beat me to smart again! I almost wail.
This time, though, I was thinking of it. I’m about to chime in, but I can barley wait for Ms Andrason to call on me, I’m not risking her disappointment again for shouting out. I almost do burst out anyway. I would have if she hadn’t looked at me that way just now. But she is going to know that I am smart too, smart too, just like Marcie.
Marcie, go to your seat.
The air freezes my bones. A shock-freeze hits me in the face with poison air or something.
Her face is strange. I don’t recognize her. She is the weather.
The words stick me like lightning in the chest. I can’t breathe.
That was almost me. What just happened to Marcy would have happened to me. I’m saved!
It feels like the gavel banged down on my skull echoing hard smashing my bones. I am sentenced. But it’s Marcie. She looks stunned. She doesn’t swagger to her seat. She trips. She falls into her desk chair. She sits there. She sits alone like a pillar of salt.
The class sits in our circle and hears the story. Something boring about a fake rabbit, that is to long to finish.
Marcy sits there. I’m so glad Ms Andrason didn’t talk like that to me. She didn’t look at me that horrible way. I’m rescued, not in my seat while everyone else is in a circle.
After the story, Ms Andrason takes Marcy to the office. I’m terrified she will know I was just like Marcy. It would be better though once and for all if both of us where going to the office together. Not just her. I need to tell Ms Andrason how I was going to say exactly what Marcie had said. I should have been sent to my seat, too.
Ms Andrason, I was just going to say that, too. So, I’m going to my seat now. Then I go sit down in my seat in the cold poison wilderness, then get sent to the office. I have never been sent there.
My mouth almost opens over and over. My body almost gets up, the way it reached and touched Ms Andrason’s hair, but I force it back.
If she looked at me the way she just looked, I wouldn’t survive. I’d be dead-in my seat-like Marcie. My body keeps springing up. Marcie is there alone. I keep shoving me down. Marcie wouldn’t be alone there if we sat in our seats, together. I’d be there, in the ice with Marcie, not knowing why either, and it would be fair. Everything would feel worse, then everything would get better, much better…
But, I don’t move-ever.
Endless adventure-less days dragged behind and drooped ahead then, but now I’m free.
Free from boring. Free, not shut in the house all day with my little brother. And there will be lots of kinds of food, every day.
Everyone else gets home from school or work where all the fun is happening, but can’t tell me about it. It’s great to go to school, I know it, but no one can tell me exactly why. When they try to I don’t understand. I ask so much why about everything. No one answers anymore. They have adventures. I don’t. They get to do things at places I can’t go. Relished embellished tales my third grade sister Tosh spins to enchant me to envy, do.
Mom, in full regretful consternation, obeys the law. She sends us to elementary school, nothing else. I beg to go to kindergarten. She said I wouldn’t get to go even when I was old enough. No one else in our family ever goes, or would go, to kindergarten.
They don’t make kids go to kindergarten so you are not going under any circumstances. I wouldn’t send you or anyone to school at all if I didn’t have to.
What are circumstances? I wonder out loud looking back and forth from mom’s face to Tarza, fishing for an answer the best way I can in as many languages as I know, all at once to see who will help me. I need to find a way to go to kindergarten!
My oldest sister Tarza likes to and can answer almost anything. She explains in patient sing song:
Circumstances are something, that could be a good reason to go to school this year. What mom is saying is that even if there is a good reason, you are still not going to go to kindergarten, no matter what. We are against it.
All I hear is: “good reasons to go to school”.
Good reasons to go to school. I know of a whole bunch of them, and one of them has to not be the “no circumstances” one.
Something is wrong about us even going to school at all. It bothers mom like me not doing the dishes after breakfast does. But I still don’t do the dishes after breakfast when I’m told to. So, I can still go to school, in the same way, even if it bothers her. Mom does not agree.
It’s not about that. It is because school corrupts you. The danger tone switches on in her voice. She tells me about how other children have become corrupt. Some have even had to be stoned by their own parents, for it.
“Corrupted” shakes me up. Grave and scary shivers erupt on the inside. I can almost feel the ominous evil spirit trying to. I don’t want it to happen to me. I know this is bad and it can happen to me in school, mostly in kindergarten, I guess. So, I’m really glad to not risk it this afternoon.
Mom, I promise not to get corrupted, if I can go to school today!
How will you do that?
I will just not let corrupted do it to me.
How will you know what corrupted is?
Because it’s bad, so I’ll know.
The thing about getting corrupted is it’s tempting. Mom has stopped dressing and is looking at me in a sudden way. She sits me down on her lap on the bed. She never does this anymore and it feels tender nice and awkward. After a minute of balancing me on her lap she maneuvers me next to her at the edge of the bed where she can look at me. I swing my feet in the air bumping the box springs while she looks at me with a very important look. I stop swinging my legs. I’m craving important.
You want to know how corruption starts?
I nod wide eyed, knowing that however it does, it won’t, because I’m not gonna let it.
Corrupted. It is when you start to like your friends more than you like to do what God wants you to do. When you think your friends are more important than God is, the devil has you and it is almost impossible to ever get away again. You get dark minded, then you don’t even want to get away anymore. She pauses and takes a hearse breath. That’s how the devil tempts you, she sighs.
I know that my survival depends on understanding what she is saying.
He leads you astray with things you like more than you like God, and you become corrupted. She looks at my face for signs. I know this is solemn, and not time to shout how I’ll absolutely win and she has nothing to worry about!
I won’t let the devil tempt me! So, I’ll never get corrupted. I’m resolute, fierce, not smiling, only knowing and solemn. I feel solemn. It’s so much nicer than the shivers and horrors feeling.
You won’t know it’s the devil because he pretends to be good and you aren’t old enough to know the difference.
I am old enough though. Only dumb people, and bad people don’t know the difference. I can too tell what is the devil and what isn’t.
How can you tell?
I just know I can.
I’m imagining a serpent whispering for me to eat that apple. I won’t eat it though-no matter what. Then I start thinking, obviously the snake is wicked. And obviously it was Snow White’s wicked stepmother, in that old lady suit, too, that made her eat that poison apple. Snow White wasn’t as smart as I am. I’m smart enough to skip Snow White, though since mom says fairy tales are simple-minded, and corrupt and have no moral, but Eve wasn’t that smart either. And see, I know what corrupted is, too, I muse. I know which story is the right story.
I won’t get tempted like Eve did! I’m sure of it. I always double-check, make sure people aren’t the evilest ones, or the devil’s servants, and I will make sure that it’s right before I do anything.
How can you tell?
I just can.
The devil disguises himself to lie to you so you will believe it.
I tell mom how I will always not believe a lie.
How could you tell it’s a lie?
Because lies aren’t true.
Every few days a new reason pops up that hopefully wasn’t under the any circumstance clause and so would get me on the adventure bus in the mornings . I follow mom around when she gets home. Different ways, surprising times, wondering aloud about a different angle, for a loophole, and bring it up in conversations, comment about it, nag, then remind her that I still want to go, to school no matter what, too. Nothing works. But the peak of my day is the hope.
I resort. Whining, begging, weeping, screaming “It’s not fair!” and being locked in my closet till I my head pulses as hard as I have sobbed. Charm fails. Getting up and being ready for school fails. Trying to sneak on the bus failed when my own sisters didn’t let me try.
Close to the end of school, all hope isn’t lost.
Mom I will be happy to go for just whatever days are left, please, please, please! Please mommy!
Ouuuuwh! This was the wrong way to get to school, for sure because mom is suddenly madder and meaner.
You are hurting my ears. I have a headache. And I’m so, so sick and tired of you nagging and begging me all day long! Under no circumstances, whatsoever, are you to ever, ever mention school to me again. Do you hear me? One more word about school and I will spank you. One more word. Don’t even say school! Her face wrung the words. The words squeezed me dry.
The best reason yet, for me to get to go to school, is that there aren’t even enough days left for me to get corrupted anyway. The feeling jambs my thought. It squashes my breath and gives me a gripping voice ache.
Then, all is lost. The “lost and never to be” void gapes wide, dark, open, tunneling through my whole chest. My sister Tosh has fun tossing things through the tunnel.
The morning of the first day of school mom is a weird mad. I whooped a piercing triumph war-cry at the top of my lungs in the house smirking at her when she reminded me to get ready for school. She did not deliver me to the inevitable dangers of first grade that first day. When everyone else walked, she refused to take me to register.
You are not going to school today.
The second day I didn’t turn the dryer on as I was told. So my fist-day-of-school purple corduroy outfit isn’t ready in time. Mom is mean and won’t let me wear it wet.
I try to show her how it’s the second-day-of-school anyway. So what do first-day-of school- clothes matter anymore? At first she tried to explain first impressions to me, but I didn’t care about those. I just want to go to school today.
I don’t have time anymore to go by the school to register you anyway.
I howl searching for any clean not wet clothes to wear. She threatened to make good on that spanking if I don’t be quiet. And you will not be going tomorrow either. Meanwhile I couldn’t find any other clean clothes and all my underwear are shame for shame dirty. None pass school inspection without washing, and she hadn’t washed any with my outfit.
My outfit is the only thing in the dryer, she had washed it by hand quick to get the stains out. It was to be clean and dry, on time.
Remember I told you not to wear your new clothes till school started? She sighs accusing.
I did remember. But it has a big yellow flower with pretty orange trim on every petal sewn on the front. This big flower is at the bottom front and to one side. A perfect spot on the front of a blouse for a big flower just like this one to be.
I could not wait for the first day of school. I couldn’t wait or change before I went outside to show everyone then stay to play. I couldn’t wait long enough to change before I ate sloppy joes. I was too hungry.
You be a good girl or you aren’t going to school at all this year. I don’t care what the law is! Her voice hung at the end of thin rope. So did I.
On the third day of school I’m walking for the first time with my sisters. I’d imagined myself on this day skipping and whistling triamphantly. All of the “I’m free!” whipped right out of my body language though. Guarded, regretful and talking to myself in “what if’s”, and “When I’s” I lose my self in sidewalk cracks. My sisters walk on ahead and turn the corner. Lost and left behind stings my eyes. Then, up ahead, Tosh is part telling part pleading part commanding Nickie: “It’s funner this way!” But Nickie comes back and risks a peek around the corner just for fun, and gestures for me to catch up.
School is wonderful. And after a while, I discover this irresistible apple. The un-poisoned apple of desperate need to be the teacher’s pet. No one offers the apple to me. I want the apple. I poison myself with it.
One of my favorite things magiked!
Can’t wait for next chance next yeat
Who with matters
It matters
because
It matters to me
Nothing else matters
Unless it matters
To you
Or to you
Or you
Or
Dumb Ways to Die
A Viral Video
Dumb Reason to Die
A Viral System
Die for
Freedom
Country
Love
– Dying for People
People matter so
The sacrifice matters
Makes a hero
Die for dust in the light
Die for no one’s stuffed toy
Die for nothing
Die for sins
Dumb Reasons to die
Three die
Why?
Media Circus and consoling with hate aren’t our only options.
**I should have posted this link initially, but here it is – The forgiveness project – teaching an alternative to hate.**
I was a victim, became a survivor, then slowly, painfully, I became just a person.
At last my future was no longer already written by the pen of my past; no longer an inevitable consequence of my history; no longer one of ‘overcoming’ and therefore still being defined by my trauma.
Not only was this a slow and painful journey for me, it was painful for a lot of people.
One of the things I used to do was something I realise now is quite common, extreme in some but often present in small ways in all of us.
By way of a silly example, let’s say someone stole my bicycle. I am angry, and unable to get to school, so I look around and see another bike just…
View original post 1,371 more words
Company for Company, Christmas for Christmas and Company4Christmas-C4C to me.
What does it mean, you think To be and give company 4 christmas? I’ finding out. You can too.
To continue the conversation worth growing. If you want to comment, the original post is alive and on burning. So comment around thet camp fire.
I didn’t say it. I’m just laughing!
Thanks RoS.
Well, hi everyone. It was awesome of RoS to invite me to guest blog. I’ve got about 3,500 blogs of my own, but Dad says I can’t tell anyone it’s really me. He’s totally uptight about that sort of thing.
I keep telling him the whole “proof denies faith” stuff is so old, but he doesn’t get it.
Anyway, I guess I should set a few things out, being as this is my one chance to be openly me.
Most people are gonna think that my other Blogs are those real fire-and-brimstone numbers, or the one’s which keep posting bits of scripture and stuff right? But they are so not.
See, if you know you exist it doesn’t make sense to argue with someone about it. If they don’t believe you, it’s okay, you just gotta shake your head and hope they get it some day.
I don’t…
View original post 1,127 more words
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I didn’t know that when the curbs started looking cracked again I was falling out of love.
Books got more interesting.
Fault lined streets jutting tectonic plates after a quake, are old and droll again. Plunging in, jutting up, crags of street twirling streaks of tar don’t dance to me like before. Weeds growing out the unruly wild sidewalk seams, depression, not mighty, mini jungles to me.
A few weeks ago they where a sign of life of loves stories, an oasis’ in the desert concrete. When I looked at them I knew: Life, worth it beautiful, no matter what. It all says nothing to me now. A week of street perfection ago, I had smiled a wave walking through these same sidewalk jungle weeds. Imagining my hand waving as I passed felt like an actual friendly salute to this magnificent life. For the sake of possible onlookers, or myself, or for both, my inner life does it, just like I do to human people but on the inside. Waving, and nodding as I passed these green people felt natural.
From the bus window, today, they are all strange, out-of-place, depression sprung up and taking over all the way from East to Downtown.
I vaguely miss something. Like missing a friend. Empty, an echo of a vague longing, about something familiar. Something. What?
The wait for the connecting bus at Sixth and Brazos is stupid. My connection bus goes by two minutes before this bus gets there. A daily near miss. It’s on the schedule that way. This is not well planned. Sometimes I catch the connection if it is a minute or two late, or mine is just that early. A few times the bus driver flashed those special lights to flag it down. A square moving continent stops just for me to get on.
The driver smiles waving me on enthusiastically. Go on!
I skip a smiling gait all the way across the street to the hissing door re-opening for me.
Some people are nice. That stranger in a bus driver uniform saved me that dreaded forty minute wait.
Sometimes though, I just know not to bother the driver’s day any more than it already is. I try for myself to catch it. Sometimes, the hope and the possible, and the being overlooked and passed up, is too much, and too much effort, so I’d just not think about it.
I feel like some of the drivers, like not bothering with my day by trapping that bus. If it it’s there, I’ll go for it, if not, I’ll date my books. That and homework time is the bus stop. I’m slow at assignments. Completing them takes up all my time. Trying to figure out math and how to cram my thinking into small tight structures that when I squash it in one side it pops out the other is brain damaging. I’m back in grade school which I never attended anyway, feeling pretty stupid doing math, structured assignments. I work it till I get it done, mostly. It takes up all my time, at school and at tutoring though. I need this bus stop time to read, and take notes-the easy parts.
The bus stop and Sixth and Brazos, is not inviting. The bench is empty. The trash can next to it is full. This stop is one of the ones that needs a pressure wash really bad. It’s been dirty since I’ve taken these classes.
I always sit on the bench without casting around a disgusted look first. I walk up to it like it’s as safe and clean as my living room couch and plop daintily down getting comfortable, hoisting my back pack to my lap, I pull out the text-book without a second thought to the hobos standing around, right behind me.
I acknowledge them as a group, like a friend entering their parlor when I walk up. After that all homework. I’m an intense student. Usually, I talk to people wherever I am unless it’s finals or I’m lost in thought. Here, though, well, I’m gonna have to spend a lot of time. If I get friendly I won’t be free to choose what I want to do, after that. I’ll always have to say hi, then manners then small talk, not just nod and acknowledge, the way I do every day so far. They are chatty. They were carrying on the first time I walked up. I know, I need this time to study, or for myself, so I just don’t want to get into the swing with anyone. Therefore, not one word.
Summer school is almost over now. I’ve sat on this bench a few times a week this whole semester. The same people are here every day, like I’m here when I can’t catch that elusive non-connection.
People are passing, people come and go from the bus stop. Sometimes an old infirm woman or man will sit next to me. Mostly though, everyone stands away from the dirty smelly place-as far away as possible. Yeah, the place stinks like pee. Or the people do , I don’t know. It always just smells, beer and dirty and body odor.
They are all always over there, so who knows. If I sit on something nasty and smelly, that would be better than treating the people who I’m gonna have my back to, like they stink or are dirty or the bench they sleep on at night has cuties. I got to be able to relax to study. I figure they will have my back if I respect them. No faces about the smell. No scowling at the trash, or checking if the bench is clean enough for my royal butt to sit on. More than anyone, these people, I sense, need their dignity. I guess, I know how they feel.
I look up, at them, then sit down. The bus had been in sight and I ran for it. One of the bums had stepped up and hailed it for me. Drivers seem used to ignoring whatever drama is going on at my lively bus stop. Why would anyone driving a bus or otherwise think twice if a hobo runs after them shouting waving them to stop? He is insane, drunk, high, joking or dangerous, and stinks.
I felt sorry that he had exposed himself to that loss of dignity. He didn’t seem to notice. I looked a thank-you at him. He ignored me. They were always doing random things. Sometimes a hubbub, bantering, sudden laughter. A shriek of dainty mini-tag and arm bumping. Compared to the passers-by, all on their way to somewhere they have to be, their minds there already, their, bodies trying to catch up, these homeless folk with few teeth and ragged clothes held up with dirty rope, these people have a life. They feel alive, more real than the shadows floating by circling at an uncontaminated distance. A man on a phone rushes by but not to fast to watch his back on this side. People cross the street before they come to this corner if this is not their stop. Mostly, across the street phantoms are floating by, somewhere else.
The life is so different on this corner. At first I hadn’t noticed. This was like the corners in small towns and cities in Mexico, where people stop to talk and hang around. Oh, that’s called loitering. Oops. I remember the way I’d pass through the usual loitering men, on my way home from work, in the dim street lights late in the evening. I lift my body to my tallest-regal body language, look straight ahead, fearless, sweeping a gaze that catches everyone who looks for a second. Small nod. Mona Lisa smile. What cat calls?
I missed the life on the street. People just looking, noticing, talking, watching the slow crowds move conscious of each other. I had an unspoken missing of the cat calls, too, though I won’t admit that to, myself.
Don’t guys think I’m pretty anymore? I know, it’s this culture. The stupid disrespectful huddles of cat callers I so hated felt like thugs back then. But goddamn, even dolled-up the casual onlooker usually lets no response escape around here. Everyone just ignores you, or barely acknowledges you. Often they turn away on purpose. No one shows any open admiration even in the smallest glancing. When they do a double take, they re-write it like they didn’t. Sometimes it looked like it was almost just there, but not. Such relief riding the bus feels like now since when you smile, people smile back. They look again just enjoying. Not on the street though.
The hobos, there were about eight men and woman in all, they are aware and engaged with everything, in their little world, noticing the flow of everything around them. We don’t talk. But we are aware of each other and engaged. Cheerful snippets of conversation sometimes uproarious laughter ripples through the smell. Mini arguments, intense complaining, anecdotes. I noticed they tone it down when I show up and take a book out. After a while it made me smile. People. Life on this corner.
I’d show up, nod, looking up, sit down on the side of the bench closest to them, and the trash can, take out a book or a pen and notebook. I enjoy this.
One day when I showed up four police officers were giving orders to my hobos, in their own hobo spot. It’s like the cops are in my neighbor’s house, conducting an illegal search or something. Some hobos were hanging their heads and not responding. One was in a quiet firm stand up with them. He kept that defending more pleading less defying stance in front of the cops when everyone else backed off, sorta behind him. He is standing up to them. They aren’t having it. Like a giant blue python, every time he breathes out his words they wrap tighter. I see the authority winning bit by bit from across the street.
I’m seeing this from where I get off the bus walking over to our community. I see the SS rounding up the scum taking them to concentration camps to clean up the streets. Those asshole officers harassing my people, putting cuffs on the one with spirit. I stop imagining my usual routine stopping at the bench, noticing my peeps. Not making sure the cardboard on the bench isn’t dirty, turning and sitting down on it, nearest to the life on the sidewalk. My mind marches straight up to the badged assholes.
Scenarios test themselves.
Couldn’t find anyone your own size to pick on today, officer?
So, you found a great place for him to live, then? Well, then, why doesn’t he want to go?
What the fuck is going on here? This is a free country isn’t it? Oh, wait. I’m wrong. It’s not a free country.
Absently comments: Wow, look at this. Cops harassing the poorest citizens. Hmmmhh Observes, intense and obtrusive, scribbles notes. Watches, scribbles notes.
Putting my late night loitering danger gear on, I remember: What cat calls?
That’s it.
Poor bastard cops. They don’t know any better. They are no better off than the street guys. So, I don’t hear what they are saying or acting like, anymore.
I walk up. My usual deference to the occupants as I’m entering their space as a guest.
Oh, I see you have other guests as well, today.
Other guests, hello. I stand there among them. A guest at a cocktail party, Mona Lisa-ing to other guests, being present on the inside , observing on the outside. I feel like a hobo, and a cop. I might have run the hobos off, or been run off by the cops, or just been right there.
Then, everyone without further anything, just headed off in different directions. The hobo went away in handcuffs, but it didn’t seem to feel serious to anyone anymore. I had a book that needed reading, in the empty silent space. Didn’t see anything going on, after that. But a feeling of loss lingered. No more hobos for me.
I’m not looking at the words I read.
This phantom street lifeless again, had a dull inevitable thud to it.
When I get off the bus on this lifeless street the next week, I scoured for my bus praying it would be there this time. Be there, so I can just keep on going. It wasn’t. Walking dazed, following my feet with my eyes, following the feet of the person in front of me heading in my direction, I don’t have to look up for myself. Looking down at the street just feels more comfortable right now. The differences, I’ve no interest in seeing what it has now become. Just thinking it will never be the same again or something. It’s changed, it’s not safe anymore. It’s uninhabited. So, I’m going to check if there is any gum on that bench before I sit, way the hell away from that trash can.
Then, I walk into a dream. All of my hobos are here, brighter than ever. I look up at them gazing longer than usual. I smile. They carry on. I don’t look for gum, or green spit wads. I cozy up on the far side of the bench so I can turn and face more in their direction, I’m not letting the cops sneak up on’em again, while I’m here.
Sat for a while wondering, got out a book to stay in character. I usually just space out thinking between bursts of reading, anyway. This time, no reading. Why are these people here anyway?
If I looked the part, someone would be shooing me off this bench, too.
Why them, not me?
Why am I here?
Why are they there?
Why not them here, and me there?
Shock hadn’t worn off. A daze prevailed over my mind. Why are there homeless people at all? Why not just not?
Why are we so stupid that we have homeless people? I imagine a world without homeless, just people.
It gave me the creeps.
No! no! We need homeless people, this overriding protest counteracted the creeps.
What the hell? Not having homeless gives me this horrid creeppies? I’m not understanding my own mind. Not that I usually do, but it’s still uncomfortable and still takes me by surprise every time, weird illogical shit starts saying itself, or more, feeling itself. I remember a feeling in an incomprehensible short story by Ursula K LeGuin, from last semester. It had given me these creeps too.
I’d written an essay on it that I didn’t understand myself, trying to understand why I was saying “Walking Away From Amelius” was just as creepy as staying in Amelius, were they tortured one person so everyone else could have a great life. Both are freaken creepy. For once, in an English class, the story meaning had eluded me. Suddenly, it’s relevant. Why still escapes me.
The homeless situation before me is not okay. There just never being homeless, that is not okay either. Not okay and not okay…So, my mind descended into madness. In this thick breathable liquid homeless are essential. There could be nothing, as we know it, without this position filled. Like baseball without a pitcher. No homeless, no game. And I love this world. Oh, holy crap. They love this world. They love it. Way more than I do. No one forced them to be homeless. It needed to be done. Someone had to do it. No one wanted to, really. So, he volunteered.
Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go. Send me.
That one who had stood up to the cops. He was right there in my mind’s eye, reasoning with himself.
Okay someone has to clean out the sewers. I guess I could do it, since someone has got to. You guys will have a great sewer system. Enjoy your lives. I got your back.
Hey that is familiar. Oh shit. Okay, he hadn’t died for me. But this is even worse. Way, way worse, he is being a hobo for me. This guy is way more Christ than even Jesus.
No miracles, no followers, no hope, no lucky early heroic death, while knowingly obeying His Father with a purpose, while he is still handsome and has all his teeth.
This guy, hand volunteered for indefinite hopeless scorn without purpose. Just to keep the balance of things unbalanced. He did it so everyone could live. So I could live here, now, and sit on this bench wearing these heels, smiling in my makeup, snug in these fantastic fitting jeans, on my way to school, in just this world. This perfect world. This perfect Hobo world.
Oh my God. Holy shit. Magnificence strikes me. Tears whelmed up on the inside white rushing forcing through an irresistible desire, a need to bound toward him like an ecstatic puppy and bow down at his feet. To kiss his feet would be even better!
Lucky for me, I run scenarios:
I rush forward, overcome with worship, falling at his feet. Smelly dirty shoes not a part of anything I see or feel. The relief is instantaneous. Like a lover’s arms. I just need to be right here in this moment, worshiping my Hobo.
All the time, I’m staring ahead into space, semi seeing him standing there with his fellows, just being. I smile all over thanking Life for sending Him to serve me, and him for doing it willingly without asking anything in return. No guilt needed. Swaying a deep swerve into love with my life, all of it just as it is, a gracious gift from my hobo. My hobo is standing where he always stands. There on the sidewalk, the victim down cast look, defensive, roving eyes, he is shooting the shit in rags with his forlorn friends, the bottles in little brown paper sacks stashed more effectively today.
Then, my Hobo, without a word or a thought or change in his usual, walks to the curb. Without looking back, he steps onto a bus.
Books got more interesting.
Fault lined streets jutting tectonic plates after a quake, are old and droll again. Plunging in, jutting up, craggs of street twirling streaks of tar don’t dance to me like before. Weeds growing out the unruly wild sidewalk seams, depression, not mighty, mini jungles to me.
A few weeks ago they where a sign of life of loves stories, an oasis’ in the desert concrete. When I looked at them I knew: Life, worth it beautiful, no matter what. It all says nothing to me now. A week of street perfection ago, I had smiled a wave walking through these same sidewalk jungle weeds. Imagining my hand waving as I passed felt like an actual friendly salute to this magnificent life. For the sake of possible onlookers, or myself, or for both, my inner life does it, just like I do to human people but on the inside. Waving, and nodding as I passed these green people felt natural.
From the bus window, today, they are all strange, out-of-place, depression sprung up and taking over all the way from East to Downtown.
I vaguely miss something. Like missing a friend. Empty, an echo of a vague longing, about something familiar. Something. What?
The wait for the connecting bus at Sixth and Brazos is stupid. My connection bus goes by two minutes before this bus gets there. A daily near miss. It’s on the schedule that way. This is not well planned. Sometimes I catch the connection if it is a minute or two late, or mine is just that early. A few times the bus driver flashed those special lights to flag it down. A square moving continent stops just for me to get on.
The driver smiles waving me on enthusiastically. Go on!
I skip a smiling gait all the way across the street to the hissing door re-opening for me.
Some people are nice. That stranger in a bus driver uniform saved me that dreaded forty minute wait.
Sometimes though, I just know not to bother the driver’s day any more than it already is. I try for myself to catch it. Sometimes, the hope and the possible, and the being overlooked and passed up, is too much, and to much effort, so I’d just not think about it.
I feel like some of the drivers, like not bothering with my day by trapping that bus. If it it’s there, I’ll go for it, if not, I’ll date my books. That and homework time is the bus stop. I’m slow at assignments. Completing them takes up all my time. Trying to figure out math and how to cram my thinking into small tight structures that when I squash it in one side it pops out the other is brain damaging. I’m back in grade school which I never attended anyway, feeling pretty stupid doing math, structured assignments. I work it till I get it done, mostly. It takes up all my time, at school and at tutoring though. I need this bus stop time to read, and take notes-the easy parts.
The bus stop and Sixth and Brazos, is not inviting. The bench is empty. The trash can next to it is full. This stop is one of the ones that needs a pressure wash really bad. It’s been dirty since I’ve been taking these classes.
I always sit on the bench without casting around a disgusted look first. I walk up to it like it’s as safe and clean as my living room couch and plop daintily down getting comfortable, hoisting my back pack to my lap, I pull out the text-book without a second thought to the hobos standing around, right behind me.
I acknowledge them as a group, like a friend entering their parlor when I walk up. After that all homework. I’m an intense student. Usually, I talk to people wherever I am unless it’s finals or I’m lost in thought. Here, though, well, I’m gonna have to spend a lot of time. If I get friendly I won’t be free to choose what I want to do, after that. I’ll always have to say hi, then manners then small talk, not just nod and acknowledge, the way I do every day so far. They are chatty. They were carrying on the first time I walked up. I know, I need this time to study, or for myself, so I just don’t want to get into the swing with anyone. Therefore, not one word.
Summer school is almost over now. I’ve sat on this bench a few times a week this whole semester. The same people are here every day, like I’m here when I can’t catch that elusive non-connection.
People are passing, people come and go from the bus stop. Sometimes an old infirm woman or man will sit next to me. Mostly though, everyone stands away from the dirty smelly place-as far away as possible. Yeah, the place stinks like pee. Or the people do , I don’t know. It always just smells, beer and dirty and body odor.
They are all always right over there, so who knows. If I sit on something nasty and smelly, that would be better than treating the people who I’m gonna have my back to, like they stink or are dirty or the bench they sleep on at night has cuties. I must be able to relax to study. I figure they will have my back if I respect them. No faces about the smell. No scowling at the trash, or checking if the bench is clean enough for my royal butt to sit on. More than anyone, these people, I sense, need their dignity. I guess, I know how they feel.
I look up, at them, then sit down. The bus had been in sight and I ran for it. One of the bums had stepped up and hailed it for me. Drivers must be used to ignoring whatever drama is going on at my lively bus stop. Why would anyone driving a bus or otherwise think twice if a hobo runs after them shouting waving them to stop? He is insane, drunk, high, joking or dangerous, and stinks.
I felt sorry that he had exposed himself to that loss of dignity. He didn’t seem to notice. I looked a thank-you at him. He ignored me. They were always doing random things. Sometimes a hubbub, bantering, sudden laughter. A shriek of dainty mini-tag and arm bumping. Compared to the passers-by, all on their way to somewhere they have to be, their minds there already, their, bodies trying to catch up, these homeless folk with few teeth and ragged clothes held up with dirty rope, these people have a life. They feel alive, more real than the shadows floating by circling at an uncontaminated distance. A man on a phone rushes by but not to fast to watch his back on this side. People cross the street before they come to this corner if this is not their stop. Mostly, across the street phantoms are floating by, somewhere else.
The life is so different on this corner. At first I hadn’t noticed. This was like the corners in small towns and cities in Mexico, where people stop to talk and hang around. Oh, that’s called loitering. Oops. I remember the way I’d pass through the usual loitering men, on my way home from work, in the dim street lights late in the evening. I lift my body to my tallest-regal body language, look straight ahead, fearless, sweeping a gaze that catches everyone who looks for a second. Small nod. Mona Lisa smile. What cat calls?
I missed the life on the street. People just looking, noticing, talking, watching the slow crowds move conscious of each other. I had an unspoken missing of the cat calls, too, though I won’t admit that to, myself.
Don’t guys think I’m pretty anymore? I know, it’s this culture. The stupid disrespectful huddles of cat callers I so hated felt like thugs back then. But goddamn, even dolled-up the casual onlooker usually lets no response escape around here. Everyone just ignores you, or barely acknowledges you. Often they turn away on purpose. No one shows any open admiration even in the smallest glancing. When they do a double take, they re-write it like they didn’t. Sometimes it looked like it was almost just there, but not. Such relief riding the bus feels like now since when you smile, people smile back. They look again just enjoying. Not on the street though.
The hobos, there were about eight men and woman in all, they are aware and engaged with everything, in their little world, noticing the flow of everything around them. We don’t talk. But we are aware of each other and engaged. Cheerful snippets of conversation sometimes uproarious laughter ripples through the smell. Mini arguments, intense complaining, anecdotes. I noticed they tone it down when I show up and take a book out. After a while it made me smile. People. Life on this corner.
I’d show up, nod, looking up, sit down on the side of the bench closest to them, and the trash can, take out a book or a pen and notebook. I enjoy this.
One day when I showed up four police officers were giving orders to my hobos, in their own hobo spot. It’s like the cops are in my neighbor’s house, conducting an illegal search or something. Some hobos were hanging their heads and not responding. One was in a quiet firm stand up with them. He kept that defending more pleading less defying stance in front of the cops when everyone else backed off, sorta behind him. He is standing up to them. They aren’t having it. Like a giant blue python, every time he breathes out his words they wrap tighter. I see the authority winning bit by bit from across the street.
I’m seeing this from where I get off the bus walking over to our community. I see the SS rounding up the scum taking them to concentration camps to clean up the streets. Those asshole officers harassing my people, putting cuffs on the one with spirit. I stop imagining my usual routine stopping at the bench, noticing my peeps. Not making sure the cardboard on the bench isn’t dirty, turning and sitting down on it, nearest to the life on the sidewalk. My mind marches straight up to the badged assholes.
Scenarios test themselves.
Couldn’t find anyone your own size to pick on today, officer?
So, you found a great place for him to live, then? Well, then, why doesn’t he want to go?
What the fuck is going on here? This is a free country isn’t it? Oh, wait. I’m wrong. It’s not a free country.
Absently comments: Wow, look at this. Cops harassing the poorest citizens. Hmmmhh Observes, intense and obtrusive, scribbles notes. Watches, scribbles notes.
Putting my late night loitering danger gear on, I remember: What cat calls?
That’s it.
Poor bastard cops. They don’t know any better. They are no better off than the street guys. So, I don’t hear what they are saying or acting like, anymore.
I walk up. My usual deference to the occupants as I’m entering their space as a guest.
Oh, I see you have other guests as well, today.
Other guests, hello. I stand there among them. A guest at a cocktail party, Mona Lisa-ing to other guests, being present on the inside , observing on the outside. I feel like a hobo, and a cop. I might have run the hobos off, or been run off by the cops, or just been right there.
Then, everyone without further anything, just headed off in different directions. The hobo went away in handcuffs, but it didn’t seem to feel serious to anyone anymore. I had a book that needed reading, in the empty silent space. Didn’t see anything going on, after that. But a feeling of loss lingered. No more hobos for me.
I’m not looking at the words I read.
This phantom street lifeless again, had a dull inevitable thud to it.
When I get off the bus on this lifeless street the next week, I scoured for my bus praying it would be there this time. Be there, so I can just keep on going. It wasn’t. Walking dazed, following my feet with my eyes, following the feet of the person in front of me heading in my direction, I don’t have to look up for myself. Looking down at the street just feels more comfortable right now. The differences, I’ve no interest in seeing what it has now become. Just thinking it will never be the same again or something. It’s changed, it’s not safe anymore. It’s uninhabited. So, I’m going to check if there is any gum on that bench before I sit, way the hell away from that trash can.
Then, I walk into a dream. All of my hobos are here, brighter than ever. I look up at them gazing longer than usual. I smile. They carry on. I don’t look for gum, or green spit wads. I cozy up on the far side of the bench so I can turn and face more in their direction, I’m not letting the cops sneak up on’em again, while I’m here.
Sat for a while wondering, got out a book to stay in character. I usually just space out thinking between bursts of reading, anyway. This time, no reading. Why are these people here anyway?
If I looked the part, someone would be shooing me off this bench, too.
Why them, not me?
Why am I here?
Why are they there?
Why not them here, and me there?
Shock hadn’t worn off. A daze prevailed over my mind. Why are there homeless people at all? Why not just not?
Why are we so stupid that we have homeless people? I imagine a world without homeless, just people.
It gave me the creeps.
No! no! We need homeless people, this overriding protest counteracted the creeps.
What the hell? Not having homeless gives me this horrid creeppies? I’m not understanding my own mind. Not that I usually do, but it’s still uncomfortable and still takes me by surprise every time, weird illogical shit starts saying itself, or more, feeling itself. I remember a feeling in an incomprehensible short story by Ursula K LeGuin, from last semester. It had given me these creeps too.
I’d written an essay on it that I didn’t understand myself, trying to understand why I was saying “Walking Away From Amelius” was just as creepy as staying in Amelius, were they tortured one person so everyone else could have a great life. Both are freaken creepy. For once, in an English class, the story meaning had eluded me. Suddenly, it’s relevant. Why still escapes me.
The homeless situation before me is not okay. There just never being homeless, that is not okay either. Not okay and not okay…So, my mind descended into madness. In this thick breathable liquid homeless are essential. There could be nothing, as we know it, without this position filled. Like baseball without a pitcher. No homeless, no game. And I love this world. Oh, holy crap. They love this world. They love it. Way more than I do. No one forced them to be homeless. It needed to be done. Someone had to do it. No one wanted to, really. So, he volunteered.
Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go. Send me.
That one who had stood up to the cops. He was right there in my mind’s eye, reasoning with himself.
Okay someone has to clean out the sewers. I guess I could do it, since someone has got to. You guys will have a great sewer system. Enjoy your lives. I got your back.
Hey that is familiar. Oh shit. Okay, he hadn’t died for me. But this is even worse. Way, way worse, he is being a hobo for me. This guy is way more Christ than even Jesus.
No miracles, no followers, no hope, no lucky early heroic death, while knowingly obeying His Father with a purpose, while he is still handsome and has all his teeth.
This guy, hand volunteered for indefinite hopeless scorn without purpose. Just to keep the balance of things unbalanced. He did it so everyone could live. So I could live here, now, and sit on this bench wearing these heels, smiling in my makeup, snug in these fantastic fitting jeans, on my way to school, in just this world. This perfect world. This perfect Hobo world.
Oh my God. Holy shit. Magnificence strikes me. Tears whelmed up on the inside white rushing forcing through an irresistible desire, a need to bound toward him like an ecstatic puppy and bow down at his feet. To kiss his feet would be even better!
Lucky for me, I run scenarios:
I rush forward, overcome with worship, falling at his feet. Smelly dirty shoes not a part of anything I see or feel. The relief is instantaneous. Like a lover’s arms. I just need to be right here in this moment, worshiping my Hobo.
All the time, I’m staring ahead into space, semi seeing him standing there with his fellows, just being. I smile all over thanking Life for sending Him to serve me, and him for doing it willingly without asking anything in return. No guilt needed. Swaying a deep swerve into love with my life, all of it just as it is, a gracious gift from my hobo. My hobo is standing where he always stands. There on the sidewalk, the victim down cast look, defensive, roving eyes, he is shooting the shit in rags with his forlorn friends, the bottles in little brown paper sacks stashed more effectively today.
Then, my Hobo, without a word or a thought or change in his usual, walks to the curb. Without looking back, he steps onto a bus.
I received a piece of SPAM this week that concerns SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in light of the new Google update ~ Panda:
On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO.
So what is good On-Page SEO?
* First your keyword must appear in the title.
* Then it must appear in the URL.
* You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).
* Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.
* Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page.
* You should have relevant usage of Bold and…
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The Beautiful Blogger Award
Thomas: “By the authority vested in me, I hereby nominate you, Waywardspirit for the Beautiful Blogger Award.”
http://astrangertoheavenandearth.com/
You thought of me. This makes me feel good. Thanks. I’m proud to accept this distinguished award. This award distinguishes Thomas, and so he distinguishes me. Now I feel the distinguishment.
Rules
1. Copy the Beautiful Blogger Award logo and place it in your post.
2. Thank the person who nominated you and link back to their blog.
3. Tell 7 things about yourself.
4. Nominate 7 other fellow bloggers for their own Beautiful Blogger Award, and comment on their blogs to let them know.
About Me
1. I make the best guacamole this side of Mexico.
2. A big slice of the world’s population does not dig my sense of humor, and I think they are boring.
3. Most of my kid years I pretended not to know the answers in quiz games. As a grownup I often laugh alone.
4. I aspire to acquire a better enemy on WordPress. Le Clown sucks at it.
5. I can feel the feelings of people around me, and over distances, when we are connected.
6. My story used to scare me. I have stopped being afraid.
7. I always think unimaginable things. Like I think that the un-justice systems in the world are such a joke that we will all laugh them out of existence, together. With this I mean even the sad, bored, disgusted, people who think they have no choice but to hold the system together will look at it, see the hilarity and laugh so hard they cry. : D
Now I get to distinguish this these fellow Amazers!
*Waves wand*
thoughlifebeaday.wordpress.com
Mind Blowing. Poems, even one for me. If you can swim with this mermaid, you may develop gills. Totally nominated!
Brave fun daring adventures of the mind and heart story-telling guy. I was just waiting for the chance to tell everyone.
metaphoricalmarathons.wordpress.com
Walking around this site makes me smile, and the wind blow. I go for walks here all the time.
naomikko.wordpress.com/
I just like her, that’s why. : )
allysonmellone.wordpress.com
She is that back and forth kind of keen wit and insight for you that weaves right into your substance and becomes you.
patcegan.wordpress.com
She will tell you! And you will like it…
gabrielgarbowota.wordpress.com
Gonna hire this guy to do my graphics. God knows I need him. Since I haven’t yet, peek at my future look and dream with me.
berry556.wordpress.com
Warms and freezes my heart when I go there. Last time, he ate all the chocolate and didn’t share. That was after he, well find out for yourself…
I re-think my life, like a new pair of shoes when I walk his way.
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Any Easy Way To Get Your Mind Blown
-Brandy Desiree Collins-
There went mine…
I’m slowing up just a little before the bumpy railroad tracks. No flashing RR crossing lights catch me today. I look far ahead left at the tracks swerving back into a wild place where the train comes from. Only trains ever comes from there. No train is coming, I’ll hop right through.
I’ve caught up to an ambulance just ahead of me, now. I’m blowing right through here as usual.
The ambulance slows down. Do ambulances stop at all railroad crossings? I don’t remember. Maybe this driver knows about that bump in his lane. I don’t stop at railroad crossings. I catch right up now. I am gonna pass.
I’m riding right into the ambulance’s blind spot about to pass it up when those mighty emergency lights flash on.
Automatic reaction, I hit the brakes and stop. A biker is pedaling across my lane from behind the ambulance.
I don’t know what that biker was thinking.
The emergency lights switch right back off.
I almost ran the next light when it hits me.
The ambulance driver was thinking.
Hijackers Crawl
Behind
Walking Away
Yellow Seed Sunny
Bright Way
Now
Day
…
No Better Time To Follow
Special Photo Challenge Inspiration
Spam alet!
Attention My Peeps
Attention WordPress
Hi folks, just a quickie.
In my kidney-crushingly funny series on Blogging Tips – I ranted at those annoying bastards who just “like you and run” to drive traffic to their site.
I have now been hit by the most gratuitous like-and-run I’ve yet had. The cretinous Robert Gibb, he of the ‘punch-me-in-the-face-grin’ and smarmy gravatar has liked lots of my posts. He is not even a blogger, not even using a blog to sell – just a straight-forward crap-shop web-site.
So this is me, doing what I can to ‘anti-spam’ that pissant little shit who has defiled my blog. WORDPRESS ARE YOU LISTENING? We deserve the control to remove SPAM likes from our posts – especially from brill-creamed bastards trying to make a fast buck through exploiting peoples paranoia over their body image.
Searching for Robert Gibb and supplements, looking for “truthaboutabs.com” (DO NOT VISIT THIS LINK- it’s a…
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Daggers
In the heart
Kill
The Anti-Christ
To free
The Christ beneath
Another way
To find Christ alive
That doesn’t work
I think
My idea for a Christmas social space is taking shape. Several Bloggers have offered time to watch the Blog and I’ve now set it up.
The basic idea is that there is a blog people can visit if they find themselves alone this Christmas. It’s not a crisis or support blog, just a place to find some company.
It’s now called Company for Christmas, (original I know!). Feel free to have a look and (please!) leave feedback HERE.
Who knows, if it works maybe we can use the idea to increase collaboration. I’ve put a lot of work into the blog, trying to think how it might run effectively – which has meant I’ve become quite attached to it, and nervous about it being good.
I honestly feel it could be great – I’m just not savvy enough to know how to get the idea properly ‘out there’ to ensure…
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Jeff Goins told me to share this, so I will 🙂
Soooooo…..
THE TIME IS NOW!
What creative thing will you do today?
Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.
–Seneca
He enjoys much who is thankful for little;
a grateful mind is both a great and happy mind.
–unknown
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy;
they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
–Marcel Proust
Let us rise up and be thankful; for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.
–Buddha
I am grateful for what I am and have.
My thanksgiving is perpetual…
O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches.
No run on my bank can drain it
for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
–Henry David Thoreau
Be grateful for whomever comes,
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Green Writer aka Noob
Accumulating your sanity
Increases mine!
Sanity dividends
Top Ten
Mentally Healthiest
In Fruitcakes 500
My Head is
In the right
Place
What the Heck Is
Bloggers for Movember Anyway?
It’s no longer:
“What if?”
Now it’s:
“What is it?”
That, and:
“When did you discover it?”
“How?”
“How have you developed it?”
“How does it make you feel?”
People are it
The reason
For this season
People make
To die for
To be great
People are the reason
People like you
In your eye
I am safe
Swirling around me
When I need you
Strong gentle Wind
The Wind I breath
Your eye
In me
Around me
I’m in your eye
My friend
My Wind
Becouse the mom is flacky
Take the childs toys
The law is on your side
That is the truth
Whats the lie…
Joy
Seen
Known
Inciting wonder
Throbbing lust
Delighting
Nourished eyes
Fill heart and body-
Word naked
The Christ is inside me
Why look around-
Were then, would
The Anti-Christ be?
Who returns first,
Again?
Interesting and short
Something I was wondering about
Maybe you are too.
A pattern
Intimate with Death
Celebrating life
Embrace Death
Cherish tender memories
A note to a departed
A candle lit for
Beloved taken, gentle Taker
This post saved me allot of work.
When I fell in love, it was his lips. The way he curled one side of his lip when he smiled drove me out of my mind. Falling in love. If you have you know. You won’t if you haven’t, and nothing can explain it to you.
It is the same story. If it’s not a smile it’s a look, a twinkle, a curve, a laugh, a way of looking, a something about, the feeling, that certain feeling, the way she makes you feel. We gladly go insane. No two fallings are alike. Yet, they are all the same. Somehow though we never tire of love stories.
I lived in mine, an altered state of reality where he could bend the laws of physics, and these laws only applied to my world with him. Even the impossible feels easy. The only hard part is being away from the beloved. It seems so clear that everyone should know and see that there is no man in the world as terrific as this guy. Everyone must be in love with him. The incredible mystery is that they are not.
Sometimes we fall in love collectively, too. We all fall in love with the same person. You feel it or you don’t. When you are lucky enough to adore an icon like everyone around you, it’s this crazy bonding riot. Communities are built around it. Everyone falls in love the same. It’s the same thing, for everyone who does, though not everyone does. It is a religious experience- which brings me to Religious Experience.
It’s the same story. If you have you know it. If you don’t know, there is no way to explain it. You crazy madly fall in love with a rescuer, a feeling, a twinkle, an answer, a question, a state, a worship, an idea, a song, the wind, a spirit a visitation, an experience, a state a transport, an exstacy. Sometimes it happens collectively. Communities are built around it. It drives you crazy with wonder and delight. The enigma is why everyone isn’t in love with this amazing God. Oh, and I forgot to mention- you can’t stop talking about it.
This experience is the same for every human being, everywere in the world, no matter what framework God is in, regardless of His name, His attributes or expectations. Like love, only the details, the stories, and the names vary. It is the same damn story.
Note: Falling in love with God, feeling and knowing without a doubt that He is loving you back, does not make you right about everything else in your value system, any more than falling in love with a person does.
P.S. Ditto on experiencing the miraculous. A miraculous experience may mean you got that part right, or that you are on you own right path in the moment. Yay for you!
Devotion is devotion worship is worship, prayer is prayer, meditation is meditatuon. Feeling nurtured and at peace, is feeling nurtured and at peace. While translating a devotional today, the delicious transport I felt is the same as when I was practicing. I don’t have to be a total believer to experiace God. Every kind of religious or spiritual practice that connects you, no matter which, feels the same. Its the same religios experience no matter what religion. It is not a matter of how we describe it. Even if it varies in intensity, and the detail is tailored and personalized the thing every religious experience in any religion has in common is we are all connecting to the same, same God Thing. The experience in a church, a tempe, a Mosque, a sacred grove are the same. The experience is the same for anyone who surrenders to any one.
What I need to hear today
No pretty picture
No poem.
No story to post.
I murder, is all she wrote
Responsibility
My public servants help me.
My Great State of Texas murders human beings in my name.
I am a Texan. Texas is my government. I love and support Texas. So I kill my fellow Texans, the ones no one ever wanted, every time Texas does-which is often. We kill people all the time around these parts.
The ones who by terrible acts of violence have cried out the loudest for help, we kill, instead of help. We give them more hell then a death penalty.
My new writing challenge:
Write to the Governor, Parole and Pardon Board, Senators and Reps every week.
Wrote, and mailed the first letters today.
…Reminding my State to keep up with the times. We aren’t in the Old Testament anymore. To say nothing has been to agree. I have murdered God’s most needy children. I stop it here.
Maybe I’ll post the letters, maybe I won’t.
Pattern Interrupted
New World Created
Is currency
Light and dark at obsolete
Like war
Life of the Earth
It matters more
Both Light and Dark
Are in
Old struggles?
Humans win
My body is squeezed tight packed into bodies, between bodies.
It is this sardine sequence, or something worse. Another hour standing in heels. Getting, milled into another crowd till rush hour ends. Then, this anyway, later tireder. Half a bus load didn’t fit on last bus. I’m pregnant, I’m brave. If I don’t get home soon it’s trouble. I’ll need to pee.
Getting green faced, feeling weak, tired and just terrible, is a sure thing if I don’t eat pretty quick, too. The nausea lasts days, afterwards. This scares me. Right now, I feel good. I want it to stay this way. If I get home soon, I’ll be fine.
I can handle a crowd. The bus pulls up. Crowd rushes pushing and shoving. I hang back. When there is no more room on the bus so some people step back. I step up then, fitting my body into the crowd of other bodies wanting to get home.
Home is in about an hour. I’ll have to change buses. Not sure were to get off yet. The directions are in my head, a very unsafe place. One miscalculation, may mean walking endless blocks or waiting for a long time. I’ve never come from this way before. The intersection from the other side, is what I’m used to. The usual is coming from the other direction. My stop will be just after I pass Avenida Morones Prieto. What I’m looking for, again?
The bus windows are low. My head is close to the roof. Heads are packed tight, around my shoulders. We’ve been swerving around curves, leaning bodies on bodies, one way then the other, for a while. Where am I, now?
Not getting off at the right stop worries me. Slanting my head careful not to disturb the people around me get’s me a peek of the street. Avenida Vasconcelos is blowing past. It will be a few more minutes then the overpass, I remember, before I get squeezed out of this birth canal.
The throng of people getting off and on is digesting me in my crowd of passengers toward the back-end. I’m already packed tight half way down this old Turkey Jet isle.
I relax. I’m holding on to the bar close to my head, resting my head on my arm. Holding on, even with the turns and swerves of the wild bus ride, is hardly necessary. The packed bodies around me hold me up. I’m just three months pregnant, so it’s not a big deal. Not comfortable for a pseudo-American with our need for personal space, but throwing up or peeing on myself is worse. It’s not really comfortable for anyone else either, especially the short ones.
Then, I realize it is comfortable for someone.
A rhythmic moving.
Double check. Yeah, rhythmic and yeah, hard right up against my ass. I can’t see. But I can feel. Helpless. I can’t move.
All of something that built up, bursts.
Oh hell no!
Snap. My whole body twirls around, knocking people into the seats around us. Pushing my way around I face the asshole.
There are about seven possible assholes.
I’m going to punch them out. It dawns on me. I don’t know which one. I could punch them all. I could yes. I feel like I can. That feels really crappy though. Punching the innocent. Nah, I couldn’t stomach that. The looks on their faces… I want to punch the guy, but not the other guys. I desist, and back off defeated. That felt so crappy, too. Neither option is okay. But to just punch some innocent guys, my arm won’t move. Protective instinct dominates. I’m at least gonna look the guys in the eye. Fierce eye to eye. I’m look killing, telling the faces, oh no you don’t, all hard in the eye. I make eye contact.
A surprised face.
An indignant face.
A what can I hold onto? face.
A what the hell? face.
A shocked face.
A blank face.
An innocent face.
No thought.
The innocent face gets my elbow in the chest and knee in the balls.
There is no room for him to bend over. I’m about to get my balance, give him the knee again. But there are to many other people who may get hurt. The man with the innocent face slithering escapes past me, crouching squeezing, thrusting through the crowd, loudly moaning.
I didn’t do nothing!
What did I do?
Eyes Can Blind Us
Sometimes our eyes can blind us and logic can be misleading. We have truly lived when we open our hearts to things beyond what we can ever see or understand.
♥ ♥ ♥
Potentially Disruptive
It is amazing how the digital world is affecting my physical world.
My inhibitions are unraveling.
In the digital world the only thing that holds you back is a key stroke.
This weekend I’ve been on cab rides in Cairo and to a festival in the forest.
All this excitement has changed my attitude toward the public in general.
I’m sharing more.
I know it sounds hippy…
I have to be careful about the hippy talk.
You know you could be shot for that in rural Texas.
Shhhh and don’t tell them I’m from Los Angeles either.
I heard you can be jailed just for visiting.
I’m ninth generation, I’m sure that’s the noose.
Yikes.
Nobody knows.
Although I do buy a lot of avocados and sprouts at the market and say dude pretty often.
When the folks around here ask me about it I just say I watch a lot of TV…
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Small
Fridays are usually a post reminding you to Take A Break and find me-time, family-time, friend-time and quiet-time. This post adds a challenge.
Be Grateful is one of the 12 Daily Emotional Fitness Training Exercises. We challenge you as you take your break time to say thank you to all that happens. Aim at least to say it 100 times, during your break time, more is better.
AND yes, say thank you to pain, stress, the rudeness of strangers, as well as the thoughtlessness of family and friends.
Mark Twain said, “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
Being grateful and putting it into words is the right thing, it will warm most people while astonishing the rude and thoughtless.
Tip one: Saying thank you to most people comes easily. The trick is to say it without rancor to those who…
View original post 487 more words
Comment on: Irresistibly Fish
Post: Your ugly baby is the most beautiful thing i have ever seen…
Question: what do you think? is it a cardinal sin to call someone’s baby ‘ugly’? what should my response be if you ask me about your new hairstyle and it kinda looks to me like a Johnny Depp/Tim Burton collaboration?
Engaging question.
You got me at hello. An answer:
There is this focus point game I enjoy. It seems relevant to your question. It’s a lot of fun, too.
This game is to look seeking to find the beauty.
You win when you find the hidden deliciousness.
That is the game.
We all play this game in a way. While watching movies, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the Kardashians, reading for pleasure. It’s fun. It’s also the noob level of the game. Who can’t do that one? Even a Neanderthal could figure that out.
To seek beauty, to notice it, to enjoy it, is a basic human drive for pleasure. To see beauty and notice it under difficult or impossible circumstances, this is extreme-play.
The high level players seek a challenge, and get the rewards of the heightened experiences.
If you think the sweetness of hot is delicious, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
I work out my beauty hunting gamer often, too, so she doesn’t get fat faced.
Any way in my opinion anything you connect with, and give your heart to somehow becomes beautiful-alchemy.
Experiencing beauty is among the sweetest wonders of being human. Challenging yourself to find it in the extreme void-of-beauty thing, is reckless abandon hedonism.
Remember falling in love?
Go to that moment. Then imagine, feeling that intensity, minus the eroticism, over something that usually does not inspire that feeling. It can. try an unrelated old person, or when you see a stranger’s baby, a down and out friend, an ugly stranger, a thing; anything, crappy attitudes work too.
Some feel this worship toward a God. This is an easy one.
Obviously babies are a challenge for you, so if you were to even think of seeking to see beauty, and feel great joy in random people and things, you might not want to start there. If you love a God. That is an easy place to start.
Or start with something you like. A shiny hot rod. A game feat. A woman. A man. First choose a perfect something. Choose anything that totally thrills you. If it’s a man or woman, try to see beyond erotic. Erotic-no brainer. That’s for noobs.
Take some time. Really feel the how the feeling makes you feel. Feel the wonder delight it inspires in you. Diving into those emotions is the way. Swimming in them, even.
Take it a step further.
Imagine it, he, she, old, and crapped out, that it betrayed you, fat, your worst nightmare. Imagine still feeling the same. Your worship does not change.
If you can still feel the same about it. You are off to a good start.
I started with things, I already liked. Just felt all my juicy feelings for it. That feeling felt so good that gratitude crept in. I feel gratitude for the thing. For it just existing, for making me so happy. This drug cocktail really works for me.
Then, after dong that for a while something happened. It changed everything.
One random day, I got on a bus.
I am hunting. I’m a predator praying on need. A need of a little boost, or a smile, a look of tenderness, some recognition. So I get to be of service. They are my customer. I get well paid. Being of service, don’t get my wrong, is all about my own pleasure. It’s free joy. No need to smoke anything to feel this good. It’s very selfish of me, really. So looking for a mother with a fussy kid to entertain for the ride, or someone to smile toward, I’m just looking for a fix.
I get on the bus, pay the driver, then scope out the… Boom! A shock wave of wtf. The most ugly person I have ever, I mean ever, seen, like a cave man in trousers. He is sitting on this bus looking straight ahead, three rows down.
Ugly takes my breath away.
I would take at least a page to describe, that he wasn’t deformed, just the most grotesque form of every feature, so I’m skipping it.
The shocked mute feeling that anyone could be this ugly. Every feature was off, like out of Hollywood makeup proportion. I must avert my eyes like I’m figuring everyone else on here is doing. The horror on my face embarrasses me.
I’m young, naïve, ignorant, but I’d just read in one of my college books about how being noticed is a basic need. And this guy, I’m betting never gets noticed. Babies always get noticed. I’d started taking the bus, and being noticed allot, too, recently. As with “likes”, and comments, I’d been enjoying it so much. It felt great. It feels really good!
I’m young and pretty, alone on a bus. No challenge there.
But this guy. No sugar for him, perhaps ever.
The bus was half full.
The guy was going to look up any second. I needed to hold his gaze for an instant, to offer him something. I’m going to do this.
I’m pleading with myself. See something that could reflect back on your face that isn’t disgusted or fake. I can not fake this one.
Couldn’t see an alternative either.
Struggling. Impossible. I can’t do it.
Being proud stubborn and driven, that option doesn’t work for me. That, and Libra must- have-fair kicked in.
So, chicken, and partial then?
Oh, so you’re not reaching out to the one person on this bus who is actually in need?
You know how inner dialogue makes no sense. Suddenly, it wasn’t a game of hunting self-satisfaction, anymore. I’m challenged. It feels like to-the-death.
Reaching for something to hold onto that wouldn’t be more awkward. My mind is racing. What expression goes on my face? How do I get it there? How can I be of service to this guy who obviously could use a straight look, and yet, not be hypocrite?
This is no cute, bored baby, give a mother a moment of rest intervention.
The question popped in my mind. He has a mother. She has looked at him his whole life. What does his mother see?
Not even a mother, seriously, could like to look at this guy.
That’s what.
That didn’t work. The guy is looking at me.
Emergency!
What does his mother feel?
Oh.
That was it. Right there, the right question.
His mother shimmers in me. I don’t know how, I feel her. Wow!
I know what his mother feels. She feels terrific! Her heart warmer than any heart I’d ever felt.
That’s my sudden calm implosion of rapture.
I’d been debating about were to sit, while all this is going down. Didn’t want sit as far away from him as possible. Yep, that is the seating pattern. A bus full of people looking fidgety straight ahead into the distance. To sit close to him I might seem calculated to not avoid him. Calculated sucks. Much less to sit next to him for charity. Charity sucks.
There are lots of empty seats. Every one in his vicinity is empty.
The back of the bus, is packed.
Eagerly, of a sudden I find myself involuntarily sidling up to the empty aisle seat and popping right in next to him. My face turns in his direction. You-are-the-second-coming-smile, fires up of its own. Looking him in the face, my mind catches up. I’m in unique and comfortable company. The real, the engaging connected person. He doesn’t smile. He is a smile.
I lose track of time.
We talked. No, he talked. I listened. He told me some things I felt in my body were true or meaningful, stirring, but I didn’t understand what the hell he was saying in plain words. Only little by little, all much, later something happens and I remember that day.
Oh, that. Cool. Some of it scared me when I thought of it later. Not in the moment though. Spellbound, I didn’t see my stop.
Your stop. He gestured with his enormous crooked chin.
What? I look up. Oh, yeah.
It was nice! Bye.
His words unraveled into long golden strings in my life way later.
From this inexplicable experience, I realize I want to exercise a seeing the truth of people muscle. Back then, I didn’t have words for it.
Well, all this is unexpected…
Guess, I’ll post this on my blog today. It’s so long….
Wow, you really have a gift.
Also, your rambling stream of consciousness reminds me of me. It’s like home. Of course I like home best. It’s nice being reminded.
Ha ha. Done writing for the day, two birds with one stone.
From Waywardspirit commenting on Irresistibly Fish
Oh, Does this apply to Satan?
-Story Telling in 30 Seconds-
*Whistles*
I am my Beloved’s seat-belt.
Mother Teresa could do it. Steve Jobs could do it. I can do it.
Video from: notabob.blogspot.com
All I need to care for this facet of the world, in wonder.
This small thing makes my heart bigger.
You make me very happy. Period. You are my purpose.
You are giving my life meaning. Fulfilling my happiness.
Never thought I’d say this. Now, I know how it feels.
You are my Reader. You are my Audience. You are my Sunshine!
That summer, I fell in love twice.
The first time falling, I went swaying, skipping sauntering dazed, in slow motion down empty streets, chasing a can. Catching it. Kicking it, feeling the pavement alive holding me. Together we play kick the can, follow the can, catch the can. The sky watches. The air breathes. Above our conversation chattering cars rumble by, during work hours in a haunted down town Austin. Wandering down the clean side of the downtown streets, through gaps in bursting yellow clouds, that weren’t there, floating on a wonderful feeling of somewhere to be. I must have dreamed it.
Drunk, high, and drinking in more. Smoking, too, drags of weightless updrafts of joy. Every delicious breath re-intoxicating. Every taste of wilder fascination with the air. Second guessing the tin can-soccer player I have become, in high heels. The best of both worlds. I’m the can flying at shiny foot tip. I am a black leather shoe. I am. Feeling all the way me, all the way everything. Drinking in that mended fence, a magic vial, had spiraled me into this addiction in one sippy taste; fast as crack. It was the fence that did it.
The fence was low. It’s sagging skeleton wheedling up to the street it ran along. It came up to the old cracked curb from way before sidewalks were invented. It appeared crooked winding in a short burst through forgotten, dull, decaying East Austin. Lost in endless streets of shabby row houses, over by the projects, this one fence crouches into view-depressing really. The horrible monstrosity just added to my depression.
It’s front yard is narrow. The house crouched up with her face in the street’s face. The color was peeling paint, over the old color.
I was lost.
The clinic had been over. By the time I found my way, and walked three times further than I thought, and twice as long as I calculated it would take on the bus. The clinic was over, I’d lost my spot.
No dental appointment for me till, I don’t know when I can get back. I need to see a dentist. It had taken so much to get here, all for nothing. A nothing death crack echos in a dark cave sending drops of moisture flying to lubricate my chappy emotions. Wasted effort sagged in my chest.
My next class would be over by the time I found a bus back to anywhere. This vague picture of where I am, tells me: If I wait the accustomed forty-five minutes for a bus, get on that bus, and stayed on for fifteen, got off downtown, waited those forty-five minutes then rode twenty more minutes stopping and going, and got back to college, I’d be back for nothing, just like this. So, even though my class isn’t starting for a few hours, I’ve already missed it. Crap.
I’d come into the free clinic one way. Then thinking nothing of it, I came out another. Now walk, walk, walking to find the street I’d come down. The bus stop, back to the bus stop. This street is not it. I’m lost. I’m on foot. I’m lost. Empty echos punch me, eyes loose up, just with realizing how lost I am.
How long it is gonna take to get home. How hot and tired I’ll be. Well, at least I know where I live. That other time, I felt so lost. I didn’t even know what city to go back to or an address, just what the streets looked like and were to get off, and what bus to get on, again. Well, I hoped I knew, anyway. Wasn’t sure. The feeling cooked me.
This time, I do. The feeling of knowing were home is makes me feel better. I’ll get home. No chance of being lost forever, exhausted, starving alone in crowds, again.
The weather is nice too. I’m not tired. I will be hungry and thirsty soon, just not yet. Glad I’d grabbed a can of lunch from the bookshop after a.m. class, before picking my way through bus routes and schedules, with my epic hit or miss accuracy to arrive here, sinfully late. Sin, translated from an archery word means “miss the mark”. Yep, I sinned something dreadful. Getting another appointment. Another three months wait. That thought curled its lips at me, growling eminent pain. I’d have to do this again. More planning, more confusing bus schedules, tired, hungry, all for nothing, and hot.
In misery, I looked around, not at the maze of house lined streets though. I looked at the weather. I hadn’t even noticed the weather. Puffy clouds, a breeze gently flapping my blouse against my skin. That felt nice. Just glad it’s not hot.
Oh, right. It’s summer in Texas, and it’s not hot. The absurdity of this, made me laugh out loud, a crazy street wanderer trudging the empty street, alone. I’d been so afraid to be caught in the heat. It’s not hot!
Perfect time to be lost! The sky reached out. It smiled. I am almost taken up into cool by the wind. Into the sky where the heat should have been baking me at about three in the afternoon. Now a friend, now a smile. The sky feels like a smile, and I am a lunatic. But I don’t care.
I turn my smile-back up to the sky.
Thank you! jumped out like a squirrel. The frisky squirrel scampered up the air. Then it disappeared into the tree-high stacked clouds.
The emptiness is where the squirrel moved in. Now, it felt like a nest. The weather is nice, I’ll be okay walking till I find my way home. Walking around…
If I get hungry before I find the bus home, I’ll just buy something at one of these repainted stores. Oh, yeah! I won’t starve like that one time. That one time when I was lost and all I had was bus fare, cramped in my stomach. When I spent that fare on the wrong bus, I didn’t even have the fare home. Horrible feeling begging for a ride!
A rare ten-dollar bill and some change all grin at me from my backpack pocket.
Walking will be my exercise for today. I smile. Perfect time to be lost, actually. I smile again.
Slowing down, I find I’m looking around for the first time noticing more than decaying streets and weather. The place. A place. A new place to explore. I’m in no rush. Everything is taken care of. No one will miss me. I stop.
The low fence is still there.
It’s made up of a number of things- a big number. Part of the pickets were replaced by some ancient rusted oil barrel, with its ends cut out. The oil drum had been slit in a jagged rip down the side and opened up, then stretched into a panel. A long bent, curved panel that stood jammed lengthwise into the ground crammed right up to the random sticks and old boards part of the fence. Some boards must have been as old as it’s rickety house. This crooked house in particular, from the looks of the eaten away bottoms of what remains of the paneling.
This fence had been mended. It had been mended, and mended and mended. It was mended with, you name it, anything. Anything that would have been thrown away, or had been. This one hole stuffed impenetrable with a faded a piece of frayed red plaid tablecloth. The round top of a big opened tin can, still sharp and, shiny, wedged itself into the ground making up for two rotted board bottoms. Colorful seventies design broken tiles peeping fragments out of the ground between all sizes of plain random rocks mixed with fat lumps of broken cement, filling in for rotted fence. Fading red and white milk cartons, new rolled up cardboard tied up with baling wire standing in for a stick. Several Corn Flakes cereal boxes are doing a job. Some grain sacks, a black trash bag, lined the bottom inside visible through the gaps. Some ripped indistinguishable linoleum propped up by a pile of pebbles. Some limply stretched barbed wire. More jumbled bunches of barbed wire, keenly placed so nothing could get out at the top North corner. There were normal fence boards too, they may have been a part of a picked fence once, perhaps white. Several bent t-posts driven crooked in the ground look strong, holding up the mixed in, random rebar reinforcements to keep the remaining original fence posts from collapsing.
Someone takes good care of this fence. Someone needs it. Someone loves it. Oh.
Oh! This artful, thoughtfully, woven fence amplifies this cracked webbed street. It belongs here, a birds nest. Like those heartbreaking birds nests knit mostly of scraps of cloth, pieces of string, shreds of paper, plastic bags and other trash, with a few sticks and feathers, a thrilling nest for baby birds belongs, like this fence belongs. It gives back. Oh.
This sleepy fence wakes up from an afternoon siesta, then. I could feel it’s eyes flutter sleepily. The bold whisper of confidence gleams, warm, friendly, like only shines through the loved and the wanted. It spoke to me. It’s love of an old woman, an old, old one inside, brought over from across the border by her children. She lives here. Their friendship has the relaxed feeling of old friendship, like old money, comfortable. Fence has always been hers, it seem. But it hasn’t. She has always belonged to Fence, though she hasn’t. This edge of chaos in her world, she cares for it. She tends to it. I could feel her attention. The fence is in her company now. I’m in company with the fence, so I know her. I love her too. I know her. I’ve always known her.
Oh, her and her chickens. In middle of this dusty, all but abandoned nowhere lifeless, old ghetto street, chickens, hens and red crowing roosters. The tiny houses, were quiet. None of them spoke of anything living. Some loose dogs, a wary cat, drudgery of mistaken spun lives is their story. Here, this fence spoke in a different voice, of someone loving chicks, and hens. She loves plants, but mostly chickens. I could see her. The fence projected her tender magic.
She feels familiar like a woman I remember meeting briefly deep in rural Sonora desert in Mexico. A rich life of animals, plants and giving was suddenly alive pulsing warm like blood in me, now. Now, I have a screen to see it on, or eyes, perhaps a soul.
Back then I was ten. I saw a place like this place. Not in the middle of the city. It had popped up from the middle of the nothing, the intolerable boring, hot middle of saguaro desert.
What’s with my eyes? Why aren’t they sore?
The green and, cool shade, out of the blaring sun was the only reason I even got close to her hovel. Well, that and we were suppose to be polite, and kind to the Mexicans. Dad said they are a chosen people. But, I can’t see why God is dumb like that. A woman with the deepest wrinkles I had ever seen, lived in this hut in the middle of the desert sun, surrounded by nothing, and nothing, living in one, if you may call it, room, with a sloping, crooked slanting porch.
The porch is hung all the way around with squeaking swinging rusty tin cans tied up with baling wire each nesting a gallon size plant. Rusty baling wire and a bunch of different once brightly colored, now fading, plastic twine hold up the floating gardens. Some empty decapitated white plastic jugs tied up by holes poked in the top sides, were wound with twine. That’s the stuff we use for tying up egg cartons. It’s not for plants. Plants are everywhere. Plans perk out of water stained, cracked and broken clay pot set atop a mesquite stump. More vibrant plants glowed on an upturned log. Plants flowing off an overturned five gallon Sol oil can. Profuse waves of little flowers in labeled cans on rocks, in old jelly jars half full of green water; springing out of coke bottles, creeping from XX beer bottles, faded by the sun.
I could see rusting cans, and out of place fading labels on new cans, rotting string, misused twine, rusty wire, clanky trash hanging were they had been hung on a nail, or tied with wire, that should be cleared up. Old, worthless garbage that belongs in the trash was placed everywhere. And why doesn’t this lady get a floor?
The whole place was like well organized trash. The floor was hard packed wetted down earth. It smelled cool, and kinda good. The porch thick knotty mesquite logs held up by crooked hand cut rickety beams, and some strong saguaro skeleton polls covered with long slender gray cachenilla sticks. On top of the cachenilla, laid across for a roof, some rusted down to nothing open barrel panels, mixed with woven plastic feed bags, pieces of corrugated tin, in odd shapes as old as the lady was wrinkled, and calloused. The house might have once been made of sawed boards and thick burnt engine oil soaked corrugated cardboard sheets. Around here, there were homes made of oiled cardboard everywhere there was anyone living. Way more than actual sheet metal houses. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t see why anyone would build a house out of either of those. Anyway, this whole hut all patched up, unrecognizable like her faded shapeless apron and droopy dress disgusted me. As did her plastic flip flops once green, I think, now more mends that original plastic strapped on with faded twine to thick calloused dirty feet, protruding toes with thick yellow claws for nails, like monster feet.
She had lots of chickens, and sad dog. The mangy dog was to skinny to be alive. I could tell she wasn’t a nice lady just by looking at her dog.
Then she offered me, and my sistersand brothers, and aunt water, so I guess she may have been a little nice. The water was cool.
Where did she get cool water in this dusty ranch? There is no such thing, no fridge.
We didn’t even have one anymore, since we moved here, and broke the only gas fridge we could get that ran on propane. Out here, no one had electricity. We broke that fridge with our old habits. We couldn’t break them. So used to opening the fridge whenever we were thinking of food or just walked by it, fifteen kids, in summer dessert heat, opening a tiny fridge, very often, killed it. Back in the day, back in the USA, there was always another fridge. Now we had no fridge.
She showed us the clay water-jug wrapped in ancient washed out faded to gray relic, strips of ripped rags, and cracking strips of black inner tube rubber wound and wound around it, wrapping, and wrapping that clay jug since the moon was born. But the water was so fresh and good. Nothing like the jug it came from or like the bony hands, and thick yellow nails that held out a smooth worn tin cup for us to drink. There was no dirt at the bottom like you might have expected from the looks of this place. The water was sparkling clear, like the cool air blowing, and the crisp feel of being closed in by all her plants, surrounded, under the low gunnysack ceiling.
She gave me a piece of one of her fuchsia flowering succulents, and some others. I asked here for a red flower one, but she didn’t give it to me. Course, I didn’t know what it was back then. Just that it was way to pretty for her. Yet, different shaped thick kinds of leaves that I had never seen before, this green with tiny flowers bloomed over everything around the old hag.
Keep it in water till it sprouts roots, then put it in good soil. You will have a wonderful place like mine.
Wonderful garden like hers? Give it time, she had assured me, in Spanish, and through gestures.
My house is your house. Come, again for more when those grow.
I barely understood her Spanish. What the heck? How is her house mine? Why would I, or anyone for that matter, want this falling over stack of trash? Just the plants are pretty. Except for the stupid things she puts them in. Why would anyone put a plant in a labeled Cafe Combate can, or worse a rusty old tin? No, wait, the shiny labeled tin cans are even worse, than the rusty ones- of course. Or why put a pretty plant into a very very old rusty dented beat up, barely discernible, once blue, chipped beyond any recognition, porcelain coffee pot? I think it may have been a pot. The Cafe Combate commercial playing on the tiny wired together battery operated radio, that is simple minded, too. Lot’s of things in Spanish are.
This is one dumb and old lady. But I like her plants allot.
Mine died. It had bloomed bright miniscule roses for a week. Red ones too. The ones she hadn’t given me. They were wonderful and refreshing, in my endless drudgery of hot desert void of life, flowers, and all but three trees, for as far as the eye could see in all directions. No green, no color. Well there were saguaros…There were mesquites. But who likes those?
It died. I’d scooped up some sand from around the porch, and tenderly, sorta like the old lady, put it in a bowl for it to grow, to bloom forever, like hers. I put it in a pretty glass bowl, so I didn’t poke holes in the bottom of it like the old lady had showed me and gestured for me to do. She can really ruin pretty things. And poking holes? Nah.
Anyway. I’m a terrible gardener. Everything dies.
But this fence, this place, this little corner of the earth in this vast desert of houses so far away, in Austin, is alive. I drank of it’s cool water.
The water turned to wine in me, spilling out. Rushing, crashing cool, slow, deep, narrow, growing wide, becoming vast, a cup, crashing falls, clouds, drops, rising waves, sprinkling onto me, into me. It took me like falling; it washed me away.
A perfect day to get swept away, too. Perfectly tossed down a storybook brook street. A perfect street, with perfect cracks, perfectly repaired with lovely sleek black tar, graceful, snaking, spilled, swirling webs of it.
All becoming magic, just like that.
These Secret SuperPower Boosters add:
50% boost to Devil’s Advocate skill.
50% boost to Monkey Wrench skill.
Available only from:
Your sister absolutely having to get them for you at a street fair cuz they are just so you!
Author unknown
From Aboriginal and Tribal Nation News
Different Gods inspired desired un-desired
Child, game avatar, friend, played, possessed-delight
Person, vast chasms, culture oceans, belief cliffs-mighty art
Long skirt mountain ridge whispers stone to her friend
Swooning open soft valley laughs her flowers back
Swirl together, please
Blend into a gooey gray uni-culture, never-ending plain?
explode color, clashing sky, land taken by sea
Intolerable un-the-same
World Life’s children-untamed un-fixed, unnamed
Playing harmony
Skating wonderfies little girls. That has not changed. But everything else has. I mean the little things that matter most. Like falling down. Like the rules we play by. Like limbo. Like the way the world feels, it’s texture.
The world first became fluid today, the world did, while we celebrated the equinox. We ended up celebrating it by pretending it was like Christmas, and we were Santa Clause. The reason that works, I was explaining to the skating expedition party of four, eight to eleven-year-olds, is because elves are nature spirits. And the gifts are dilivered with the seasons, four times a year. Nature and or elves are making what we need, and want. They have been working all season to make gifts. At the turn of the season, we put out our lists to be be checked twice. We get what w ask for by aligning with the changing energy, and allowing it to move our life, too. That it only takes one person to align with nature, and put in the list of what is needed for life to get better. This is what happens at Christmas too, I’m making this up as I go, because, in the case of Christ, one man delivered a great gift all at once to the whole world. So, can anyone, is what dawns on me. Whatever it is that we want and need for our world, we just align, ask, surrender it, and then, in the moment, like midnight at Christmas, all the homes in all the world get unique gifts that are all still the same. Didn’t you guys wonder, I find myself asking their curious smiles, how Santa reaches every home at exactly the same time all around the world?
They look at eachother. The litle one shakes her head, two nod, and shift in their seats, and say I know huh…That is all done by people working with nature to deliver them, energy gifts, like salvation and that. Whatever the Santa person cares about, and wants to be delivered is delivered. In Christ’s case, it was something special. The ancients calculated the exact moment of the equinox, and solstice, to catch the wave, and shift the gifts on it. So, we can too.
And we did. After that, the world I ware is made of softer, finer brighter fabric.
The rink was different than other times. Youngest didn’t know how to skate, yet. As I held her hand taking her around the rink, it occurred to me that she was going to fall-allot.
Well Punkin, you need to fall five good times before you will be able to skate.
She eagerly said okay! all exited. she was eager to fall, to start counting!
Celebrating the falls was the most laughing fun.
No, that one wasn’t a good fall. It was just your knees. Do you think that counts for your over all total?
Nah.
I know right. Let’s get a really good fall in.
Laughing, every fall, she shouts out her number.
At five. Yay!
Now, every five falls after this, you just level up. You get better, and better, funner and funner.
She smiles with eagerness that doesn’t come from trying not to.
At the game of limbo, which she had never played. She thought it was a do-over video game.
She was never out. She didn’t quit. Weather she made it or not, she got back in line. She tried again.
The whistle blowing meant nothing to her. She kept playing, laughing, going under.
The best gifts have been delivered.
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World Gratitude Day today!
Fall arrives in the Northern Hemisphere tomorrow, September 22, 2012. I love fall. But, I’m not in a hurry for it to arrive, I will happily wait one more day and enjoy today. That’s because today, September 21, is one of my favorite days. Besides being the last day of summer, it is also World Gratitude Day, which was established globally in 1965 and has been slowly gaining steam.
To commemorate World Gratitude Day, I have compiled my 50 favorite quotes on gratitude and appreciation. Since I painstakingly etched them on a parchment scroll, I thought I should share them. So, I have unfurled the scroll below for all to see. Collectively, they all lead back to the same benefits, but they each have their own subtle nuance or shade. Hence the title, 50 Shades of… oh well, you know what I mean.
This collection is not all-inclusive, of course, so…
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Still laughing!
Some days, it is probably better not to share one’s thoughts.
As I sat daydreaming positively at my desk, I wondered how my search for truth was coming along.
I know, I’ll search for truth on Google!
This turns out to be the worst idea I have had all day: I get “about 57,300,000 results (0.07 seconds)”. Perhaps I need to refine my search?
Anyway, here is the screenshot:
This reminds me of how I used to search the internet for words in context when all that was available were 28 bps modems. Does anyone remember the days when you could only have one Internet page open at any one time? And how you could click on a link, go and make coffee and drink half of it before the page loaded? And then it was the wrong page?
Yes, children, this is all true.
So, let’s summarise page 1…
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I’m figureing you are.
I know I am. That, and when we are really young we are especially weak-minded. As a matter of fact, kids are all of weak mind. Yeah, all kids are, including them Arabs, and all the other ancestry in our collective genetic melting pot.
There isn’t enough title space to list all the “other” races, and identities, though.
Yet, in each world culture, somehow, every weak-minded kid ends up with one of these, pre-packaged “identities”. Pretty much, she just puts it on, and wears its. It’s a permanent, unchallenged fashion. It’s also exclusive, and often, mutually exclusive, unalterably tied to wherever, and whenever, this kid happens to be living. The kid becomes just like everyone else around her. How weak-minded is that?
Why not become more like people from some other place? Why the copycat, unoriginal becoming?
If you live in Texas, like I do, now, that makes the Dallas Cowboys strong. If you live in Austin, yes, Austin, Longhorns rule. If you live to far North though, your view gets skewed, so Texas A&M football may cloud your judgement. Or if you are born into the wrong kinda family, like a Texas A&M family, you are in trouble. That is some unfortunate karma. Sorry for you. We stay away from them, when we can, politely. We know who to support. So do our kids.
By the time an American girl grows up, just like the little Arab girl, she knows for sure what is good, and what is sucky, and why. So, do the Pigmies, and so do the Philistines.
I have kids. They are of weak mind.
Two live in Mexico with their dad. We haven’t been together since they were toddlers.
One lives with me. Her dad barely even knows her.
My two daughters, with daddy in Mexico, they think I’m scary. The one with me? Well, I’m her best mommy. Their weak little minds created these images. Yet, I’m me-the same person.
I never really grew out of my little weak mind, you know. Supposedly, I’m all grown up, and yet, when I get this email… I never do figure out how to mail anything in for this Weekly Writing Challenge…
…What was I doing again?
Whatever it was, weak-minded me, stops. I open this email.
Right on target, there is some comment in there, referring to me, personally, as weak-minded. How prophetic is that?
Weak minded.
See that scary looking guy, yeah, that word again, that guy, right there in that middle YouTube video picture. See him? He is the balding guy in that miniscule dark picture, right there at the bottom of this bad photo of my inbox.
That guy there referred to in this report as the “Mormon Manson”; That’s my dad.
His name is Ervil LeBaron. No one has anything good to say about him. Lot’s of people have lots, and lots of bad things to say, though. I was born when he was on trial for having my uncle killed. Then, it got worse. He died, some prefer, he was killed, in prison when I was seven. But, then, after he died, the situation he helped create, got much, much worse.
But, it’s been a really long time now, and, yet people don’t stop talking about him. Somehow, it’s still relevant.
I wonder why?
That, and what does a weak-minded kid, like me, usually feel about her daddy?
The usual: He is awesome!
These guys in these vids, they don’t think so, though. In general, their wicked perspective isn’t to far off the story.
Shane Smith of Vise, did a fine job of framing and, telling the stories, His rug, “it really ties the room together”. I appreciate that.
Since this is what I write about sometimes, and it’s so much more, than these short, somewhat deranged videos I figured I’ll share them with you. Anyway, who isn’t deranged? Besides, some spun tails about my family have been so damn much worse. This guy, at least, like Sanjiv Bhattacharya, in his book, Secrets and Wives, on Polygamy in general, has pretty decent perspective for so mysterious a subject as my wayward subculture, its ancient faith, and my good old family. It’s a sad story.
I haven’t seen that last vid yet. But, there it is. Now, I’m going somewhere that is not a coffee shop. My head phones are lost, and I really want to hear this.
Scary.
Part 1/7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef5YU6uaAH8&feature=player_embedded
Part 2/7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvm_98WTHYg&feature=watch_response
Part 3/7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzUUIY9g0wQ&feature=player_embedded
Part 4/7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5RRg3OvV1k&feature=g-all-u
This must be how we create a new world…..
Fresh for you!
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) Discuss
“There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.” – Neal A. Maxwell
I smiled sideways, all day
Thinking of getting your letter
Smiled all day when I got it
And all the next day.
What if, in a past life, you lived the Holocaust?
Say you were there. You were in it. For this, you get to choose whether your role was as a victim, or as an aggressor.
Choose one. Which do you choose?
Just for a minute, pretend. Pretend that you do believe in past lives, Even if you don’t.
If you do happen to believe in past lives, skip this part.
Step up.
Choose one or the other. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a mater of which.
Imagine, unimaginable quantum possibilities as you return to your past. Remember, then feel, go deep. Re-live your experience.
Choose:
Yourself, suddenly, deemed murderer of Christ. You are beginning to get looked down on more, and more. You hear public speeches full of lies about you and your good people. Your bright eyes dim with all the babies in you community crying around the clock. No big deal though, such has happened for centuries to some degree or other down the generations since your ancestors. Just not the babies all crying all the time, not that.
In the open aggressive old chums shun you passing in the street. Your own friends do it. Your sweet old customers give your sour filthy looks. A once respectable man, he had respected you, now suddenly he has no qualms openly stealing from you. The police do not respond. They laugh. After a while you wear a big red star on your clothes.
Your community, your neighborhoods, are collapsing in whimpering chaos around you. Your livelihood falls to ruin. How will you family survive? Your customers no longer come to your graffiti pocked, locked business, except to take what they can carry in wheelbarrows. Once friendly neighbors wildly, sack your ancestral heritage shop in the night. You stare defenseless subdued, by tear streaked helplessness at the blaze billowing smoke. You a hide on roof . Your old friends en mob are gleefully burning you property to sticks.
Somehow you start turning into a beast, a big dirty hungry cockroach. Then, like the infesting insect you are hunted down, and exterminated. Your family cower for months, hidden by a couple of terrified old friends. You barely just exist, cramped, fearful in the damp dark, starving, dreading, again, again, the sharp stab, dull dreading.
Creeping months of terrifying dieing, bang bang bang in the dead of night! Police shout at the door, again. You feel your friends fear, and the guilt as you hear them yelled at, beaten, moaning, all for your unworthy sake. You hear your friend beg them to stop hurting his wife. They don’t stop. The wall crashes down. You vomit with terror, then miss snatching up the baby, before you are beaten, arrested, and dragged away. Your protectors are arrested, too. Baby is left.
Your beloved coughing, bleeding, sick and broken, dies defeated, eyes wide with horror, arms still around you. You are left helpless, undefended in the cruel alone, on the never ending, freezing train. You arrive at Auschwitz.
There, your few acquaintances are beaten to death for your benefit. Working in freezing weather your rag-swaddled feet get frostbitten. Blue, red, cuts, swelling, swollen like ripe fruit, red infected, juicy oozing. You work, or you die on these feet. You watch your sick frail father stripped of his clothes beaten in the freeze, moaning, writhing on the ground, then still. You can’t help him. You get no last word, no comfort for him. He watches you watch him beat. You are marched away. You never see him again.
You starve while you get frozen again, and again every day. You are worked till you drop. You fall and can’t get up again. You can’t move. No one can help you.
As an example of what happens when you aren’t worth your shovel, year are beaten numb with it. The faintest spark of hope, of grace disappears, you feel abandoned by God, feeling hollow, soul-rotted, unsaved. You don’t care anymore. Curse them, you die.
Or:
You are a respected, upstanding God-fearing citizen of a proud wonderful race. Your eyes are eager and bright. You adore your family sweet wife and bright boys and a darling girl, with golden curls and dimples, just like her mother. You work hard to take good care of them, especially your aging mother. You get this job, at first, just to pay for her treatment by a renown surgeon specializing in her condition.
When you realize that there is an internal threat to your country, it’s no question weather you are going to defend it. That’s when you get really into your work. You excel, are paid well, and promoted. Finally, mother gets proper medical treatment. Your sons attend proper young citizen youth training in the best academy. Miraculously, Mother is improving. This is the one doctor that could help her. You did it.
That’s when you start to really get it, and understand what is really going on in your country. Everyone is awakening to realize the persistent massive evil threat. How our, unique, superior, ethics and ways that the future morality of your children depend on, is in jeopardy. They have always been a threat, since they killed Jesus. No one has ever been man enough to totally do something about it. But, before all the world, we are now. Which but this superior race would take on and complete such a massive, and daunting task? To cleanse the world of all disease baring, destructive, biting, swarming, pesky, stinging, crawling vermin. Imagine the world with mo mosquitoes or roaches. This is even better.
It’s not even a question. Your only purpose is following this is noble ever revered way of life. You are proud to step up to your duty to serve God and Country.
You get promoted to the slaughter house were one of the biggest challenges is to realize that though sometimes these animals may seem human, they are unquestionably not. So, you absolutely don’t allow their impure tears or cries of such children, or wails of mothers, to ever make you weak. The moaning deceitful enemy will do anything to entice you like snakes to be allowed to re-infest, and infect the land. Ha! You know better. You know what is right.
The work is abominable work, and doing it makes you hard as stone like a soldier should be. You are strong, and you know it. You prevail. You are unmoved.
You help the good cause process more than a hundred thousand of the vermin right out of threatening the greater good. Sometimes teasing, and taunting lifts your spirits. Making sport with the animals helps with comic relief from the drudgery of this dirty job. You get as much sport, and fun from your job as you can. Why not?
You where doing a great job, really saving the world from this threat to humanity… Then, betrayed! The glorious work is cut short by the army of Satan. You know you are the good guys. You know it, but you get defamed, persecuted, hunted, captured, accused, and put on trial for your beliefs–the dictates of your own conscience.
These traitors! Yellow cowards, couldn’t stomach what needs to be finished. Enticed by their weakness, their inferior minds, let their emotions take over and control them. They are weak. You are not. The whole world, at first, had sighed with sweet relief, agreeing with your magnificent work. Everyone know something had to be done! Inferior race! They changed their weak minds like a bunch of geese when success was withing reach. So, close.
You, the pinnacle of creation, the only ones worthy to survive pure, now abandoned. It’s in your nature to persevere. What else would a truly honorable servant of the state do?
Now, suddenly, after doing all the good dirty work, you get screwed out of respect honor and your reward as the devout soldier you are. Then, further, you get humiliated, stripped of your position, dignity, and disrespected. Your superior country is lost. All is lost.
You start to be seen as a monster, abhorred and shunned by all the world, now. You are treated like an animal.
You don’t understand……
Which role did you choose?
Oh so, you really would choose a game like this?
I wonder how it was offered. What enticed us to play it in the first place?
This game is like baseball, maybe that’s it.
Three strikes! You’re out! We are up!
Now, switch places.
This game scenario is Major League.
There is no shame if you prefer to play Little League.
Reaching out
Entwining fingers
Invisible, all-visible
Life that is mine
Taken to dance
Beating a wild step
Waist under His hand
Twirled, swung, let go
In always still hurling
breathing in the breathless
Snatched up out of into eternity
Held, spun, dimples of twinkles
Celebrates, delighted in
Bursts into yellow bows
You gave me two Summers
I took the Fall
Lady Spring, and Lord Winter
Danced down the hall
Whitened stone sepulcher
Un-whiten, yellow, crumble
Resurrect in flowers
Fun Perspective, diversity, how does this make me feel?
“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”
Bertrand Russell
From Syrian Atheists
* * *
Aza’s Story
Bosnia, 1990s
(from ‘Escape from Bosnia’ as told to Sue McCauley)
“On 27 March 1992 I went home to Purtici…I was going to stay for the week, then return to Sarajevo as I had oral and written exams coming up. On the way home I stopped off at a mountain town where I had some close Serb friends, and went to have a coffee with them. One of them said to me, “Please don’t go into Zepa. There’s going to be war there.”
I thought he was joking. “Why should there be?”
“Can’t tell you that,” he said. “It’s not my fault, it’s not your fault, but there will definitely be fighting in Zepa, and very soon, so keep away from there. Leave Bosnia. If you don’t have…
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Sparkling flowing river framed, is prayer
Riding a wild river bursting into sky, is a place prayer may take
If you have been down this river, like orgasm, you know it
Flowing mighty thank you, take you
There is this thing.
It’s this thing that happens. I wouldn’t say that it just happens. It doesn’t.
Yet, when it does, it feels sweet mysterious, suspiciously like magic-a flash of light, and a spell.
It’s nothing; like story.
It’s nothing; like feeling.
It’s nothing; like myth.
It’s nothing; like magic.
This nothing; it is a thing I like the most.
Instantly, without warning I’m taken up, and dropped into an alternate reality. Snap. All the rules are different.
Time is ticking. It’s The Maze. At first I don’t realize. The faster I escape this maze, the bigger the reward I’ll get. The first time the random event swept my Runsecape character into it, I did a double take. One second a friendly player I just met and I were strolling our way to Dryner Village. The next second, I was lost. I didn’t know how to communicate back to my friend to say thanks and goodbye. I definitely didn’t know how to get out, or if the computer had gone mad, and loaded some random game. I’m lost in there for fifteen minutes, long past any reward. It was so much worse than the puzzle random events. Nothing redeemed me. Tears of frustration, dread of being whisked back there at any time, and sometimes a heroic, nephew rescue. finally, I got a pad and pen to keep track of the order of the clues. And with that a systematic quick get away. It started getting easier.
Game life got better. Life got better. No more stuck for 24 hours in the maze. Learning to use the chat features to tell my friends that I had been kidnapped by a random event helped. But, sometimes I was gone when I needed to be somewhere, or left people waiting. Sometimes, they left me waiting.
After playing a few days, you’re on the same page with other players. The good feeling of being in the know, where everything is under control, makes it okay to suddenly disappear from the main game. Then, just as suddenly, to reappear in a mini-game, and stay there till you solve the puzzle or escape the maze. It get exciting, then feels normal. Though the game never gave you a choice.
Later you discover fascinating by choice mini games with rich rewards. The rewards entice you to leave the World of Runescape to play in a game in another dimension of Runescape where the object, and, all the rules are different. When you win, you get super cool stuff, envied by those not brave enough to venture into the inner-game.
When you choose to play a game within a game, and leave reality, or you are randomly swept away to an event in that other dimension of Runescape, no one calls you demented. Dimension travel is not dementia. It is not medicated, institutionalized, curable, or non curable. No one figures you lost touch with reality, or you got manic. No one doubts your sanity. It is not a pink elephant.
It seems like The World is like the world of Runescape. Except that people never get used to random events. No one is supposed to acknowledge that anyone else is choosing to play an extreme mini-game, and will be out of the main game for a while.
In this world we pretend that there is only one game, one set of rules, one God, one reality.
Only one is true.
The Truth.
It’s hard to tell if my conscience is more like a tar baby, or more like a hand rail.
Maybe it’s a tar covered hand rail. A handrail along the straight and narrow that get’s me all sticky, and glued to it. I’m wondering if my conscience is meant to keep me on my path, or meant to keep me stuck.
Or, it may be meant for something totally different, perhaps outdated, or just very basic.
Conscience must be one of those special use tools. It’s like a hammer. It works real good for nails, but not for scraping ice off a windshield. Or a tool like the weather station, which may predict hurricanes, and tornadoes, but isn’t any help with earthquakes or volcanos.
If I count only on this conscience of mine to guide me, I still get into trouble, and karma. I stay stuck. Or even dig myself in deeper trying to defend it.
It seems my conscience plays by the rules I already know. It does not cover what my consciousness doesn’t cover. Whatever my consciousness is, so is my conscience. If my consciousness is narrow, so is my conscience.
By narrow, I mean it has a small umbrella, doesn’t cover much. I can do everything wicked outside my umbrella without a pang. It’s how, when I’m a soldier, under orders, committing murder somehow doesn’t equal murder. That’s conscience for you. It plays.
Or maybe it’s following some life purpose or blueprint like what I came to learn or perhaps what I learned in a past life didn’t work. I don’t think it covers what I haven’t, at some time, already learned.
As I grow, so does my conscience. I have to believe something is wrong for my conscience to work me. It doesn’t function with what anyone else believes. It only works with what I feel, and believe is right or wrong. When my beliefs change, so does my conscience. I don’t have a conscience, without something to base it on. No one has the same conscience, I guess.
So, now, I’m only counting on it for what I already know, or have known, sometime.
The unexplored worlds beyond my present experience, for these, I figure, my heart knows, and will know what is right for me. My feet know their path, too. They can keep me on my straight and narrow: straight, because it is always the step straight ahead. It’s narrow, because only I fit on it. My path is only mine. My heart figures stuff out, then tells my conscience. That’s how I must have come to have some conscience so far.
I learn by experience, vicarious or otherwise. My personal conscience also seems to be made up of what I’m taught, when I actually believe it. If I don’t believe it or feel it, no conscience for that one. If I believe a lie, then my conscience may bug me for something like walking barefoot, or telling the truth.
Until my conscience grows up, I’m dangerous.
A wild-eyed, grinning toddler.
Writing Shoes
A writing game
Everything for a level
Other levels- intangible.
The tools, invisible.
Living quest
Playing for story
My game-bound conscience is out of it’s mind. It always has been. Does it have a mind? What is a conscience, and when did we start to have one?
It might be a dictator. It may be a cricket. It may be both, and more, and less.
Our celebrated American freedom is about the protected privilege of acting according to the dictates of your own conscience. Or is it the freedom is about acting according to the dictates of your own cricket?
This cricket, she or he seems to chirp a different for everybody. For some folks the cricket, is a feeling or a knowing. For others, intuition, the voice of god or an angel, a voice inside. Often, the voice is a still small voice, yet, sometimes it shouts, echoing in inner space. For others or at other times, it’s an urge, or a heart flutter, a warning, boring guilt, anticipation of guilt, red flags, or the sharpness of the edge. It could be regret. What kind of cricket is this?
I don’t implicitly trust this Cricket Dictator anymore.
Let your conscience be your guide? I don’t think so.
Did this guy tell our beloved forefathers that the unfenced land in the new world was already taken? No, it dictated manifest destiny. Did it warn the pious praying Jews to flee Hitler, or holy Christian Germans, and the rest of the consenting world, that a holocaust was definitely a bad idea? Or were we all just not listening?
It’s hard to imagine a whole nation, that can’t figure out the difference between right and wrong, until you remember our own conscience didn’t cover slavery back in the day.
Now it does. Did our conscience need an upgrade?
The conscience cricket seems more like an -antivirus. An antivirus only covers known viruses, after it’s been programed to. It won’t help you out against being a holocauster, or owning slaves, or chopping down sacred trees, until it’s programmed to protect you from committing these violations.
For example, if you were an evangelizer, and you pass up an opportunity to save a soul, and you know that soul will go to hell, your conscience will itch, just as if you had cheated. But if you were a shop keeper some tourist towns in Mexico, or doing buyers beware business, under some law, making out on a good cheat feels rewarding. Cheating is the thing to do, a way of life. The cricket has nothing to say about that.
Or did your conscience give up?
More likely, a conscience is a consciousness, of the rules you are playing by.
Every creation myth seems to come with completely different rules. There are lots of different ones in our world.
What game are you playing in your life?
What are the rules?
That is your conscience. That is your consciousness.
What do you think we are racking up Carma over, and yet totally innocent about?
Wonder.
It’s cool what we get to think while no one is looking.
“I bet you’re a really good liar.”
A back-handed compliment if ever I heard one. Someone said this to me not long ago, in the middle of a fiction workshop. During the break between one hour and the next, I walked back into the room with my cardboard cappuccino to find my classmates discussing my lying capabilities. Bending the truth doesn’t seem like something we should ever be proud of; most of us grow up being taught the exact opposite. However, since this group of people are all in the business of telling tales, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit pleased with their judgement.
I recently started thinking about dishonesty and the significant power that a really good liar has at their disposal because of a Secret Cinema screening I attended.
Secret Cinema is a wonderful project which screens films in themed environments. From my seat in the…
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Hey there, God, whatever you are. Hi!
How are You?
What’s up?
How are you feeling today?
What’s going on over there?
What’s on Your mind?
I see.
I can talk to You. You can’t talk back. Why is that? Is it really so? What’s wrong with this picture? Makes me wonder.
What’s it like to be talked with, talked to, and talked about, yet to not participate in the conversation? Are You not free?
Why do I like You? What if You did talk back?
If You blog, what space, where?
Is inspiration Your tweet?
Surprise me with a message in the field!
Wolfe tenderly glared me in the eye, willing me, not quite begging, me to understand. You care more about things, and ideas, than you do about people.
I care more about what than what? Your saying I don’t care about people? You make no sense at all, is what I’m feeling.
Piercing him back with my eye, I brush the whole thing off. I know he knows what he’s talking about. Yet, he is off.
Had I seen even the faintest glimmer of what he was talking about, my feelings would have curled into a ball, and whimpered.
It was obvious. I know I care about people. That was that.
Till now.
With temperamental love a fit all over my life, pretty much like my relationship with writing does when I get other busy, I know something big is off. What? Blame my partner, sumptuously tempting… Ha ha, that’s the dumbest thing I want to do. Writing is demanding, and temperamental, let me blame it when things get crappy there.
Just to get it out there, so I won’t be talking behind your back. Writing, you are a lot of hard work, and a big pain, and sometimes you suck.
Writing, sometimes it’s fire, it blazes; warming, consuming, cooking, destroying, out of control, doused, gone out. Sometimes It’s ice.
Often, I’m failing at it. Times of manic writing, erratic slumps, sickly, bloated to please, smelly, writing; treacherous unfinished stories; lagging, droopy perspective unwinding itself, liquid acid dripping, dead weight sprawling on the page.
It’s a tricky thing, writing is, like any worthwhile relationship.
Yet, committing to it, a marriage made in Nirvana-imperfections and all. I always, pretty much, show “Writing” my love, and devotion.
Writing is an idea, written work, a thing.
People, yes I do love “people” and I show it. No need to go into all that.
Yet, for love of the forest, I missed the tree. The one tree that is mine.
It’s not “people” I don’t love. It’s person. I don’t show I love the person. A Person.
I’ve been more into being loved. I thought I’d committed, but commitment isn’t words, it’s showing up, and showing.
How the heck do I show, and do more than I’m doing, and still be myself?
No answer.
At the edge of the end, the obvious, a wash of cold water, with ice, smacks me in the face. I have been asking the wrong question. It’s not, How can I be happy?
How can I make him happy?, is the way. This focus swap changed everything.
Just asking the question to myself, felt like turning around, and heading off in a different direction, on a strange road, to somewhere else.
How can I make him happy, while at the same time being happy myself?
Making him happy is, pardon the cliché, a labor of love. Labor, as in, hard ass sweaty, please can this be over, work. It’s just like writing.
I’m loving it the whole time, except when I hate it.
Smiling.
Wolf told me so, but I didn’t understand what he meant, even enough to believe him.
You wouldn’t know what love is if it were painted red in front of you!
That’s the way it was put in The Trading Post Girl, a story I loved. I’m the same little girl delighted by this story, while the whole time I’m saying to myself, unlike her, I do know what love is…
But it’s not working,-love isn’t.
Wolf explained to me, You show someone you love them.
Tried that, it just felt like trying. My inner Yoda had allot to say about that, whole trying thing, too. He just repeated the same thing allot of times.
How the hell do you show a man you love him?
Guys don’t like flowers. I’m going down the list. Ways to show, Ways to be, ways to behave, ways to look. It feels hollow. My heart is getting hollow. So is his.
I guess it’s all the romance novels, not including The Trading Post Girl, of course, narratives of a woman being loved, adored and, well, romanced that had me imagining happily ever after was a state of being. It’s not.
To a man a romance novel must read like a honey-do list. Impossible, therefore uninteresting.
The guy, in one of these novels, he just does things just right, every time, for his beloved heroine. When he makes a mistake, he realizes he is wrong, and rectifies. Then, he does everything right all the time after that. Then, once she is convinced by his unimaginable feats, and risks that she is really loved, they live happily ever after.
Happily ever after?
What the hell is that?
Wolf said the same thing, about that, just in different words; “I don’t think you are ready for an every day man.”
That is what happily ever after is- Every Day.
Every Day does not read like a romance novel. So, pretty much, I’m not ready for Happily Ever After.
Which sucks, because I like the romance in the novels and happily ever after is where I wanted to go. But, I’m doomed.
Then, after overcoming shock and horror, and with humble acceptance of my loosership, I got to figureing; relationship, it’s like writing.
So, I love to write. Actually, I need to write. So, I start a journal. Then, blogging sometimes works good. I’m enjoying just writing whenever I feel like it. I love to write!
I’m liking it so much I get serious. I think I’ll make a career of this. That is when the romance novel ended.
Boy was that a marriage!
Then, there it comes, right were the happily ever after is supposed to be, heartache, and heard work.
It’s a beast, writers block, making a living, the horror, and tedious headache of editing, that and a million loose ends. Then there are the times something needs to be written, but refuses. When inspiration does not knock. Sleepless nights of doubt, fear of rejection, then actual rejection…
Where is the happily ever after?
When is the happily ever after?
In my last post, I told you how I was procrastinating by writing a children’s book…’cause, you know, that’d be easy.
Aside from the concern over illustrations (before the book was written), I pondered presentation (again, before the book was actually written) and wasted an afternoon educated myself on book binding thanks to YouTube. These things look hard…and make the writing seem easy.
Seriously though, writing for a reader who is not me is difficult. I don’t know the vocabulary or how much detail is too much or how much foreshadowing is needed.
What surprised me as being even harder than vocab and foreshadowing was tense. From the outset, I wrote in present tense. It felt like the natural thing to do, but I have no idea why. Everything else I’ve ever written has been in past tense.
I’ve heard that present tense is the new thing for novels…
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Don’t you just want to smile, sometimes, and allow someone to be your hero?
I do. You know, let someone else be challenged where they are great.
I’ll be the hero where I am.
I’m guessing, the more heroes in action in the world, the more my greatest visions of a wonder world are happening. You know, every person has a different power, so no one has to do everything, and get it right. No one group has all the powers, and is able to do everything best. Apple is the exception, of course.
Not even the mythical powers that be have got it all, they just have the powers that be, not the powers that are to be, nor the inner power in every person. That’s allot of power not to have, when it’s rumored you got it all.
What about the power of fate, belief, need, desire, and entrepreneurship, and well, to cliché it, love?
I’m sure the Powers That Be sucked all these up, too.
By the powers that be, I mean whatever it is that I imagine, has got power over me; death, taxes, and the devil, or fate, circumstance, lack of opportunity and all that race, gender and luck related craziness, and institutions.
What about my own powers; perhaps my own superpower?
For me, the knowing I have a power is the easy part. Believing in myself, and trusting my choices, that is the wicked part. You know, delusions of grandeur and all that.
Thinking I am especially gifted, mystical in some unprovable way is like pointing out a pink elephant in polite company. It’s signing up to be stereotyped, getting those slanted, unbearable, sanity questioning looks then flying headlong out of a cozy community. Yep, super fun that one.
I would be complaining, but I am my own polite company. I give myself the looks, and ostracize myself. My shoulder is ice. Then, I accuse myself of delusions of grandeur, and who do I think I am?
Who am I to have a spidy-sence which I can act on by non-action, and the stillness of asking? Who am I to always get an answer, and get results?
So, delusions are on my mind. What is it that triggers the idea of delusions of grandeur?
What is the difference between offering a viable, mystical, unimaginable, super-gift, with epic healing or whatever, effects, and being stuck in a place of, I’m so great, or in thoughts of I’m so powerful?
It’s becomes clear when I ask myself the right questions.
If I were a superhero, and could really make a difference, what would that difference be, as in, who is affected?
Something is helped, a person, a group, a community. So, let’s say I help, using my unique powers, and willingness to do it, and this action makes the world is a better place. So, this makes me a hero.
Why?
If being a hero means doing something good, helping someone in need for example, or making something better for people or a person or animal, or a place, then it is important because the person is important.
No person in need, no hero. No person with a problem, no hero. No powers, super or otherwise, needed. To be a hero, someone has to need, and not be able to do for themselves. That need becomes important only because a person is important.
So, the greatness of a superhero is derived from the intrinsic value of a person. You are a hero becouse of the value of a person helped. A person, any person is so valuable and intrinsically worthy of rescue and care, that if you have a superpower or any power and help the helpless with it, it makes you a hero.
You can be a hero by the rescued person recognizing that you recognized their value, and acted on it. A person sees you for the powerful person you are, and believes in you. The “powerless” endow you with power.
That still came from the person, or as it’s said, the people. You a the hero to whomever sees your action and believes in you and requests or allows you to serve them. So, the heroness is endowed from the helpless. Then it is strengthened by anyone who recognizes your abilities. abilities that would mean nothing, if no one needed them or recognized them. So, heroness still originates form the power of those whom it serves.
Heroness exists because of, and to serve man’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The quality of hero, is of the people, for the people, and by the people. It’s a gift that derives its power, and it’s meaning from the people it serves.
Delusions of grandeur are about truly having a gift, some healing power to serve, and not recognizing it is only good in service.
It’s only good because people matter.
by not recognizing my own intrinsic, innate, person value, then figuring I need to suck it out of my great gifts then reapply it to myself is the process of manic aggrandizement.
People matter most.
When I look around, I can’t tell.
Now I look at the way I have been treating those closest to me. I have forgotten that motherhood is derived from the preciousness of the child.
So, now I chose to remember. And I’m choosing to remember that I am the precious child of my community, of my government and the powers that be.
It seems like our ideas of “public service” have been manic, depressive, and delusional.
So, what can we expect from our institutions?
Hitherto, I’ve expected just what we have all been experiencing, together, children and grown ups alike.
Now, I figure, that I am the meaning. I’m the reason, and the purpose of my community and my civilization. I am the power, and the purpose of my government. Everyone works for me.
Everyone works for you
And those of you waiting for an invitation to use your superpowers to leverage out clean free energy, to de-glitch the economy, wrangle world peace, heal the sick, feed the hungry, beautify and sanctify, and create heaven on earth for me I’m offering you some of my power for our purpose.
I am in service, too.
Thanks all my superheros!
Phenomena doesn’t seem to need explanation, so much as imagination, and un-begged questions.
It isn’t so much the danger pink of the elephant that is scary. The creepy part is being the only one to acknowledge it, and to feel alone, like the only one who wonders of it, and then, sometimes wondering about yourself.
Then, it matters if any un-questioners wonder. Life begs the mystery, the unimaginable, the unthinkable to be expected. It just seems so, or why else would we, as a race, be so fascinated with the unexplainable, the magic, the light, and the dark, even if we allow fiction to be its main explorer.
Perhaps it’s all the enigmatic nature of the game of Nature.
Mystery keeps things fun.
A need, wanting, takes the fun out of adventure for it’s own sake. At the same time, it adds purpose, creates relevance, meaning, and a story. The height of the stakes, just how bad something is wanted, how deep the loss if it were lost or never found, make matters matter.
What is it like, how does it feel, to wander on purpose?
Flipping over that impossible, towering, seven-foot gate just happened. I was leaping up with all the force of my running leap, grabbing the pipe at the top and, flying over feet first before any thought or reason. It was the only way to catch up to Jared, my brother. He was going to outrun me to show me that he was not meant to do house work and I was.
If I climbed over that gate he was clambering up leg over leg the way he was, he would be out of the yard, around the corner, and out of sight snickering, or silent. But, he would have got away with not admitting to unfairness.
If he got away, I’d have lost the element of surprise. So, next time I brought it up he would be prepared and I’d be made ridiculous.
Just because the grownups make only girls do the housework, while you boys don’t have to do anything, doesn’t mean its right. You can pick up a broom sometimes, too.
Well?
I don’t have to talk about this. No grownups are asking me to clean the house, and cook, and stuff.
I know they aren’t but they should. You get to explore all day, going on adventures, while I can’t do anything till all the food, and dishes, and floors are done, which means almost never. You could think about helping. Maybe, just do one job. Maybe sweep the porch.
I don’t have to. And, if I did, what would stop me from ending up with more, and more chores?
You mean like me?
Yeah, like you.
No, you don’t have to, but it would be fair.
I don’t want to talk about it, and you can’t make me.
Off he trotted.
Come back, this is important.
You’d have to catch me.
Now that was impossible. He could evade five or six fast kids bigger than him.
Being laughed at when I failed to even get close to catching him was almost as bad as doing all the housework, all the time.
Then, I just found myself chasing him in slow motion as fast as I could pound my feet forward. I was falling further and further behind as we approached the gate at the end of the long courtyard. He had plenty of time to climb it before I could even grab his leg.
He had to agree to sweep the front porch. So, then, Josh and Danny would fallow into doing one job each, as well. That would begin the long road to fairness.
When I landed next to him at the other side of the gate, he didn’t bother to squirm away or run. His eyes wore shock.
How did you do that?
Same way I’m gonna get you guys to help, was the unspoken truth.
Nothing came out.
The boys volunteered to do the sweeping that week. Dishes were still to much to ask.
Fairness, the need for fairness, flew me over that gate that day.
What propels flight now?
What incredible, crazy super-gift does every singele person I ever encounter secretly possess?
If you had a superpower, if your natural gifts, and passion were boosted into the range of the miraculous, how would you have fun?
What do you need to begin to really offer your gifts? What inspires you, and what ignites your super-passion?
What do I do in every encounter with any one stranger or not, to bring out their super?
What world will I live in when every person is being their own sweet superhuman?
This is the world I want to live in. You create it for me. So, how can I help you do it?
I’m experimenting on myself.
Quiet, is my favorite morning.
Fresh ground, French pressed, light roast Ruta Maya agave half and half swirling. My Christmas mug in August runs over with amazing coffee. You know that feeling.
Mostly it’s the quiet. The time to visit a familiar quiet blank “space”. Yet it’s the thick acid free, line free, sketch-book journal, and it’s mate, a good Precise, extra fine pen by Pilot, in lieu of a fountain pen, which fetch me at least my four, maybe five, smiles. Five if you count this hitherto unnamed, yet, possible, other place to smile from.
There is no sence going into the state of fountain pen magic in my life right now, to avoid the grief, of loss of nib- please, pretend it wasn’t mentioned. *Sigh*.
With or without the unmentioned, the best part of the morning is spacing out, wandering in wonder, exploring the creation, this evolution of cyberspace on internal internet.
What kind of space is this? That other possible one to smile from, perhaps. A telepathy place, to connect with my friends, inner circle, think tank, mentor, writer’s group, The Wind, then to quest for the holy anything. Then, to quest for its opposite.
The adventure flows or drips from an inner, innate, inkwell, through a blue inkwell in my hand via a fuzzy dial-up connection that drizzle patterns onto the journal, swirling like coffee, of the day’s living, the milk, and the honey.
A walk, a pretty shop, an artful display, some verse, an essay, a snippet of story, some stretching, a bit of yoga, memories, might delight today, sprinkled with a mini Tarot reading for myself.
The cards are in my book back for…Oh, the gamble! The anticipation, the grounding of that little random picture-telling- the little coffee joy if it. The giggle, a furrow, a what? Hmmmh, and an I never would have thought! So, this is what that feeling was. The surrender to: Okay, I’ll be practical, and do the polishing kind of rewarding hard work…And an oh, no wonder! All of which are sweetly anchoring for a spirit tripper.
So, Spirit descends like coffee, and through the pen, to be born of flesh this morning, and live.
Manic depression is an unrecognized healing gift.
She just said it. Dr. Renee Hilmer, my body talking chiropractor lightly tossed into our few minutes of chatting while she adjusted my feet to end at the same length. She was telling me how my body was compensating for an injury I didn’t know I had by bending itself out of shape, to keep my head on straight.
yeah, your body talks to me. She didn’t mean it that way. She meant that in her body she felt what my body was up to, so she know where to focus and how to talk my body into healing. Or something like that. That wasn’t exactly what she said. I couldn’t focus.
Healing gift. Manic. Crazy. Depression. Healing gift?
My spidy-sense sparkled, then, instantly fizzed with a bucked of ice water with ice cubes, so sparkles wouldn’t catch anything on manic fire.
Manic depression, it scares me.
Admitting that I think I may just posibly have a healing gift, is invisible, pink with a trunk and big ears, but it’s more likely manic depression. Don’t manics always think they are special?
And who am I to be special anyway?
That’s why superheros wear masks, I think. We are socialized to not recognize, or expect the truth about those who recognize big service magic in themselves. And if they do, it’s often, used to play up, ridiculed, or out of control.
Discovering and properly coaching, using a super power is as much a life long vocation, task and, a learning curve as honing any innate innate recognized skill. It’s just genius in a niche. It may take time, and maturity to practice and apply. Or may be sudden strokes. It could be hunches, intuition in anything about anything, on any subject. Sometimes we have to work at it and get it wrong. Like making a basket. Mistakes will be made. There will be gains, and losses. Yet, there is a day worth saving.
One of the reasons super hero’s don’t discover their powers is well believing in the imposable, and the unproven, the unsubstantiated is so hard. I have really big reasons why not to be super. Everyone does.
Like what others will think or believe, or not believe.
No matter what special incredible gift a I have, it seems pretty normal to me. And so it is with most everyone gifted in spiritual, or unscientific or mystical or any gift not measured by a test and, that already has a top school or program ready to snap you up and connect you to the machine, math music sports buisness.
Once a person does something big, and measurable with the gift, and gets great renown, then we believe it is a gift and start looking for it.
Who is the next Steve Jobs?
No one was looking for anyone to do what he did before he did it?
So, wonder.
By my wondering, the unimaginable gifts that would turn our world into an even more wonderful place are all locked up. Inside me. Inside you. In our insane asylums, in our prisons.
Rather than suffer year after year of drought in our land, why not wonder what a rain dancer could do for us and nature and the environment? And where is this person. Hey, rain maker. Hurry and get a hunch. Get this message in the field. Get an inspiration, a request, a desire, a dream, a thought, a feeling, or god speaking to you. Whatever works for you, whoever you are, we need help. Much appreciated. Thanks
Wonder, where is the hero, super or otherwise, born just to save the world from __________ ?
I wonder what people or group are making my life sweeter, and in which ways! Hey guys, wherever you are. Can’t wait to find out!
And just wait till you feel the terrific improvements I got coming your way.
I wonder what happened to the hero who’s life purpose was to make sure income tax laws where never passed.
You know all those apocalyptic scenes?
Anything in our world that sucks is post apocalyptic. The world were that particular thing existed to make it wonderfu, or didn’t exists to make it wonderful, well, Some Ida Tarbell gave up. Every service in our world would already be a monopoly if she had given up, and no anti trust laws had been passed.
What worlds are you helping to create, or destroying by not believing?
The chosen one? There is a chosen one for every tiny unimaginable detail wonder that could exist.
You are a chosen one.
Everywhere you look a chosen one.
So, when I have a problem with the way things are, like mosquitoes, I wonder. Whose passion, and adventure is it to recreate this world mosquitoeless?
Whoever you are out there, crazy person, I believe in you, and hurry up.
When my crazy ideas or spidy-scence tingle, a call to unimaginable service, now I allow it to call my spirit forth to serve. But, I keep it to my inner circle, and hold the world in my pocket, till my job is done for that day.
Trust me, you have been in my pocket.
I keep my super hero work quiet, and, private. I even secrets from myself, sometimes.
I follow!
I’m starting a new series on LitLib called, “Craft and Draft.” It’s going to be an out-loud, unfiltered learning experience for me that I hope others can benefit from as well. It’ll be focused on the drafting and revision process and all the crazy magic-voodoo shit I’m learning in grad school!
The great thing about the contextual ambiguity and synonymous nature of the words in the title is that I can use them interchangeably to talk about writing or beer. I am so clever.
Hope you enjoy. These posts will be filed under the “Literature” and “Writing” categories for future reference.
Disclaimer: I am a 26 year old male and still have a childlike infatuation with Lego. I also take bubbles baths when I’ve had a rough day, almost cried when Will Smith (Dr. Robert Neville) had to kill his dog after it got infected, think hydrangeas are pretty flowers…
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Broken, never mended.
Smashed to pieces, then crushed instead
Pretty stones to pretty sand, then clay
Mixed with the refuse of the earth salted damp
Life’s light lays her egg in carved, scooped out living stone
An unnatural plant roots here
Neither human nor Divine, not in place not in time.
Neither place nor creature, both and human and Divine.
He was my second. Two since then, but he was special. Lightning flashed with internal thunder the first time he laid eyes on me. That first look wrapped a halter around my soul and dragged my heart along. It didn’t beat fast in that familiar way. It didn’t skip a beat. It sucked in the universe. Then exhaled s fresh universe where I am captivated by this one whom I had already loved with all may heart, anyway.
I’d waited four weeks for him to open those eyes. I’d been waiting, but that was not why my soul was drawn up by him. Like I said, I know, everyone knows what cute little babies look like. I’d loved quite a few little darlings myself, from the day I met them at the hospital or the day they were brought home by their mommies. I’d had a baby before.
Yes, my first-born, she had lifted herself onto her hands all wabbly and turned her head to look across at me from under the jaundice lights where the nurse had insisted on putting her right away. I’d had to command he to, and she relented and had rolled the bright light table with my baby on it,right up next to me. Then left.As I talked and cooed to this strange new creäture, she did a bouncy wabble head turn from side to side, inspected the room, then inspected me. When she had looked at me in that magical post childbirth bonding window moment, I got the message inscribed in the field there for the parents to absorb. I just knew, like I knew she was mine. I hadn’t let her out of my sight since she came out, and her mouth was unmistakable. No babies mouth had ever taken up half it’s face when it cried like hers did. All babies of same basic race basically look the same, but not her. Her mouth when she screamed opened pretty much twice the usual size. And the message had sunk in right there after she had latched, or grabbed on the first time and herself a nibble, then got the usual inspection right there in front of me, and had looked over at me from that table. I just absolutely and suddenly know it. No doubt. I know like I’d always known that she was , the smartest child ever born since the dawn of creation. The dawn of creation thing, because the whole history of creation evolution, more creation, and more evolution and millions of choices, and all that time, so much time and change played like when your life flashes before your eyes. Her historical origin of life flashed right before my eyes like obvious evidence. Like I’d seen all the work put into creating this unique recipe of intelligence, just so, and just right for something and, never before made. Guess I could say custom latest model, but more mysterious, and magnificent and fleeting. Like a sudden flashy thingy. Back then, I didn’t even believe in evolution. I guess I started believing in that moment, but didn’t have words for it.
She read and understood the weather cycles at three. Found ways to skip school in kinder, mad with boredom. Then all teachers at the elementary school she attended in Mexico put together a gifted students program to keep her out the endless mischief she wrought while the rest of the classes where still finishing their work. She gave them no rest, so they got her half way through middle school, and she got tired of five years in a row being the top five in her grade in Monterrey, and having to go on the same school trip to the same theme park. And we didn’t take her to shake the president’s hand. That is all pretty normal stuff.
This was different.
He looked at me. He really looked at me. He opened his preeme eyes for the first time, he looked straight at me and really saw me. If he had winked, I wouldn’t have been more surprised.
I got you mom. Remember?
The bright light was on the inside, and gone leaving me reeling in the rapture of love.
Oh my little baby, my open eyes one. Open Eyes. Open Ojos. Opi Okos!
Afterwords, throat breaking jaw wrenching howls, convulsed my body knocking my breath loose. while my hands ,blind, pressed down to hold the ruptured bits of, the exploding stone that filled up my chest sledgehammered to pieces in one smash. Flying shreds of fragmented rock bursting cutting scratching, the dust choking. I can’t breathe. My arms went limp, and ached for weeks, like a headache in my arms that needed to hold him. Imagining that I held him didn’t take the ache away.
Laying right next to me so innocent, so sweet, were I could rouse myself to feed him every two hours, for fast weight gain, that week, but he had up and died.
As I figure it, he done it on purpose.
August in Elgin needs a breeze. She need the cloud wrestling fall breeze to trot by, sweeping leaves, and spirits up. Fall Breeze, however, is not due till the end of September. Her soft puffs have nothing to do with this. This smashed stillness after Sun pounds the land into vessels of radiant heat slow released in tepid puddle nights. Still Heat and Cool Breeze don’t even talk. They passed each other on opposite errands in set weather patters.
This time of sweltering year Rain Storm is on vacation. A schoolteacher, she is completely unnatural in July or August.
This year is a fairy tale. They must have friended, and liked each other on Facebook. Then the birds got involved. Suddenly, this year, it rained two weeks in July and August. Almost very evening, too, one or other of the Wind sisters clad in wisps of cloud, or wrapped in thunder heads, sneaks in for a girl’s night out with one or the other of the Natural Phenomena. They dance ancestor princess dances like the sea is near by, only without the humidity.
Mother Nature is catching on.
the dream felt like me. to feel like me feels good, and bad. the part about being a young girl looking down out a window onto a narrow street feeling drawn to the people and, the flow of life. the girl ends up in a mafia family working as a family member, then, not able to do what she is told to do, then, stealing away into the back seat of a car witch then suddenly takes off. we end up driving up and witnessing a fight, that escalates till one person kills another, then open fires at the only witnesses in the nearby car. I’m describing being shot at, to my partner, back under the covers after he woke up and he told me his dream. His dream was three images.
In the middle of my reaching into my memory to grab a detail of the feeling of being in the back seat of a car, with a suddenly mine baby, and how it had looked like just a drunk and the night watch, then the fight escalated to two bad asses and the drunk turned hit man, shoots the place up, while I’m in the back and the driver, he is the mafia guys driver, doesn’t drive off or let me out or help till the victor is shooting at us…
before I get there, the part about ducking, then suddenly remembering to reach back up for the baby, the man next to me in bed, who I’m telling my dream to, asks me were I put the grocery shopping list.
the end of the dream stuck in at least six places. stack of bad memories, stack of grudges, stack of hurt feelings, stuck in throat, beginning to squeeze out eyes, and just a drop of it in a tiny place of reason, there are more spots, but not logging.
bad timing to break down and tell him he is being an inconsiderate listener, but, I do. he doesn’t even know what i’m talking about. not the best timing, or treating a man.
the day, ruined for both of us in most of the sparkle eye aspects. my sparkle went and extinguished his on the way out. we mope. what is it we love about each other? what is it that i needed? what have i loved in my life? why have i loved?
oh, i feel love when you are interested me.
revelation.
so does he, and everyone else.
revelation.
there is a place
the place of myth and legend.
a way there. imagine a multi-player virtual reality game. woe is you if you have never played one.
a brand new character just born into the game for the first time, can’t do much, no matter how great a player is playing it. to be able to reach its potential, a character does tasks, repeteative jobs, goes on quests. developing character makes it easier to be moved by the player.
You are spirit directing your player. Fresh players can’t do much. experianced characters rock the game world and are so fun. Its allot of working play to get there.
you are the life of your character the way spirit is the life of each. the more
there is a place.
a place of myth and legend.
one way there?
imagine a multi player virtual reality game. woe is you if you have never played.
a brand new character just born into the game for the first time, can’t do much. it’s handicapped no matter how great a player is playing it. to be able to reach its potential, a character has to do stuff. you set goals, together you and your character completes tasks, consistently do repetitive jobs, go on quests. developing the character makes it easier for it to be moved by you the player-spirit. It responds to your commands. It makes good “choices”, your choices.
You are spirit directing your player. Fresh players can’t do much. experienced characters rock the game world. they are delightful fun! Its allot of working play to get there.
you are the life of your character. spirit is life. the more the two have gamed together meeting growth requirements, the more the weak pixel flesh obeys the spirit. the place were you are one with your character, lost in pownage is the seat of the soul. soul grows. the story you create together, and experience of you, and your character is living a life. as a gamer, you grow. vicariously experiencing the triumphs, and defeats of your character, and becoming a better player, improving motor skills, researching how to do what needs to be done, forging relationships that affect your character, and their character, and their experience affect you. this is soul. it’s the soul growing.
as people, when we feel weak and are afraid, we may make choices that take away part of what joy can be gained from living fully. choose to not engage, not go on any more risky adventure or give up time, hope, or trade the priceless experience for safety. blocking access to previously enjoyed places or skills damns. like a river, flow stops. this fear is a devil. you just sold your soul to it.
this, is our treasure in heaven. we work for it here, by living, by engaging, by playing, by choosing to not give it up.
Inner space, the ground the plant of soul grows down in. spirit, air light, and space to grow up, and a sun to grow up to.
playing for the dark side?
like playing for the light, it has it’s rewards. but it’s way suckier-full of karma. It means taking the long way home. team lucifer does the dirty work part. being the drama causing catalysts, high stakes, opposition, and character building by setting up hurdles. so, light has a worthy killer adversary. challenged, winning means something.
think harry potter, without lord voldemort.
now try to imagine a good story.
Now imagine volunteering to play voldemort, so harry potter can become a hero, grow his soul, create a story.
go team lucifer!
A cool gamer, a toon avatar with spiky yellow heir and a baseball cap looking ready to play and win liked my Way yesterday. He is the first like ever for this blog. Well, it isn’t finished and hasn’t really been tagged or public, nor have I mentioned it to anyone. Then, I tagged my pit “gamer”. So, Young Mr. “What’s Your Tag”, came along and liked my little gaming writing avatar.
Yep, you guessed I follows my gaming, writing, blonde little friend right back over to his website, witch by the way is funny as hell.
I love to game. “Play with us”, sais the invite. Bring your gaming tag. Thank god for google. What the hell is a gaming card? and, Why don’t I have one already. I’m a gamer. An accomplished gamer I might add. Where do I get this identification, verification permission to play, authority, prize. What’s Your Tag? is the name of the cite after all.
What am I missing? A brain? An invitation? A chance? Friends? Proof? Exsaltation?
I would have been out in the cold if this were religion. Shunned by these better than thou, only we can play if google didn’t exsist.
And yet, like a religion, not of my choice, I don’t game xbox, so I can’t get into their heaven. It’s heaven to them, and if I want in, there are all those hoops to jump through. And even if I choose to buy into the xbox, once I start, I’ll be a noob, with an undeveloped character. I think I’ll stick to my perfectly good religion, Runescape, where I am exsalted.
Where I get all the best benefits of the game if I pay the membership.
To each their game, sport or religion. If the holy spirit enlightens your heart and mind as it does for me playing my game, it’s a true religion.
Imagine online gaming merging into gr-avatars, gaming and competing in a gaming Olympics where each game is represented. What would be the creation story for this kinda world?
Every skill or desire, need and adventure has its own creation story.
Why do I want what I want?
How did I get to want it and delight in it so much?
How did I get it? Or how did I not get it (yet)?
The order of the questions is the equation of the archtype of story.
There are as many creation myths as there are characters who experiance buigining. If there are two sides of a conflict, right there there are to opposite stories. A girls side of it. A kids part in it. The magic persons perticipation. The pesants, the princes. The more perspectives the more stories. The winners write history, but the losers control the undercurrent the underground. Losers have the best stories. The underdogs shadowy, dangerous, to straight or to crooked characters that in reality no one wants to be around, delight us in stories and movies.
As long as there is a journey where growing is happening and new adverturous story is created who really cares. Pirates have been the terror of stories and still terrorize some seas now, yet, the adventures of honor and the lack there of among thieves delights in Pirates of the Carribean.
We pay attention to and learn from what ever we are drawn to and connect with, from our family and community and the sports and teams around us. So we get our creation stories too. And there are as many different and amazing ones as there are sports teams.
A Mystical Shop. I’m in the middle of row and shelves eagerly shopping for karma.
The image drifted down like a big red leaf in the fall. I reach out and catch it in mid-air.
Hello leaf.
What do I do with you?
Its bright golden orange, rimmed in red, cut edged perfect symmetry, intricate design. The ground is not covered in leaves. The leaves high above in the magnificent canopy aren’t flaming.
This one fell to me.
At home, it has a place on my altar. It lives there quietly till it grows into visions of Quest Shopping. Eager, calculating planning choosing like an avid gamer.
Character building. Challenge selecting. selecting a sport, taking sides, building teams, training, evolving the rules of engagement, looking forward to the trials, tests of strength, the growth qualifying for the championships.
The bending of the rules. Braking the rules. Winning. Cheating. Prize. Losing. Playing. To die. Playing again. Trying again. Leveling up. Finishing quests. Making friends. Making enemies. Seeing our friends die. Being rescued. Creating new stories. Reliving the good old stories.
The World
Our game set ups are as ingenious diverse creative and engaging as our movies and our t.v. shows our art and letters, architecture and fashion. What world? What challenges, what rules and constraints. Which limitations? What do you want to learn? What to understand, to strengthen, to redo? What will you do over, to achieve?
Reality might be made of the answers.
Could be.
Kids seem to just know what makes them come alive. They know what they want to be, do or have. When I was that kid I always wanted to be a prophet. I felt it like some kids felt like growing up to be the president or like Babe Ruth or Micheal Jordan. I wanted to be a prophet like little girls wanted to be Miss America. I wanted to play ball, to dress up, to compete, to be good enough to play with Jordan, or even, whoa, to beat him… I wanted to outdo the prophet Jonah, to play a new and exciting game of we saved that world and brought peace to the land. Then, to hang out with all the great and mighty warriors, poetesses and prophets and talk about upgrades.
The idea of worshiping Jesus or St. Francis or Joseph Smith never did occur to me. Sitting down together and talking about how things work and why. That’s what I imagined doing with them. Planning better ways to play out the game. Discussing even greater possible conquests of the devil and his minions, and making better plans than him. They knew. That’s why they are saviors and doers of great mystical deeds. That’s why they are great stories, myths and legends. I wanted to figure out how. Then to be tested and found worthy; to outdo every one of them. Then, to sit down together rehash it, and do it all over again, like over drinks.
Then, I found out that only boys got to rescue, and to be heroes. Cuz in the one and only true church which (of course) I belong to, only men are able to hold the priesthood. I don’t think it’s about being heavy. It’s just that God ordained it that way. See why I have questions? That, and you can’t do anything worthy without it. Your hands are tied and you don’t have what it takes if you don’t get hold of that damn priesthood. To not have it is like trying to participate in a car race without a car. Every guy wants a car and maybe even to race and to win. Who wouldn’t? I’m not a guy, and I sure as hell wanted to be in on the middle of the fun. Not cheerleading like I was expected to. I wanted to race and to crash and to drive and to win.
So, I double checked since that wasn’t gonna stop me. I asked and studied, and found out that Deborah was a prophetess in the Old Testament. Eliza R. Snow was a Mormon prophetess, too. So, I could be one. There sere few. It was the exception, but it wasn’t impossible. And more rare exceptions are on the way is what I was thinking when I might have been in elementary school, but wasn’t, because in our church it was ordained by God that way.
I had the best start though, cuz at least I was in the one true Church while everyone else, well, they started out wrong and would have to come round to the one and only true church before they even had a chance to be eligible. Muaah haa hah!
I worked at it for years too,–hard.
Then I gave up. It’s the most difficult, and arbitrary complicated, and thankless job.
God damn!
Then, the worst part about it is the sheer number of clambering prophets claiming the gift, and the calling while all going in dramatically different directions the whole time. Loudly contradicting each other arguing fighting and defaming each other is one big grown. Please.
It’s like a sport. We are gonna be champions!
No! We are the best!
You guys suck! We are gonna win. And our cheerleaders are prettier and cheer better too!
No wonder it’s a man’s world. Woman wouldn’t stand it if they were in charge. Instead we women get to support our priesthood holding husband/prophets against the other false prophets, and support the team, I mean the one right church, and all that.
So, I wanted no part of it. Just the tiny skirt, but not the pom poms or the cheers.
At least I didn’t for a while.
Anyway, being a Jonah is between the person, and their God. But, when called, if you are, no matter if you like the climate or the sour taste of “false prophets” all around you or not, its Nineveh or the belly of the whale, or both.
Got to thinking. Everyone isn’t called to Nineveh, and not at the same time, either. Nor is there just one prophet or project out there. Like turning that city Nineveh around to avoid destruction. God knows people, families, companies, institutions, businesses, we all need to get turned around to avoid destruction, rock bottom, divorce, collapse, bankruptcy some time or other. I guess there is one assigned prophet at a time per specific job. But god damn. There are lots of prophets everywhere doing weird, and unimaginable stuff. So, I guess there are lots of weird and unimaginable projects and lots of mysterious work to do. Prophets are the ones weird, and crazy enough to do it, like entrepreneurs.
I mean its God, the I Am. The One Way, God. Yet, He tells different people to do different things. So, just for my own sanity, I figured. Either God is insane or I am. But, on the other hand its said that God is great, unimaginable, wild and powerful and no man holds his counsel. So, well, I don’t either. And if the unmeasurable, omnipotent, incalculable loving intelligent crazy Being called hundreds of people and asked/commanded/inspired them to do totally different, often freaky and impossible contradictory things and NOT to do what the other guys, also called, and ordained by God are doing… Did I mention sanity? Its like God has one group exclusively fanatically apart and different from what “God” tells everyone else, who listens, to do. It’s like okay you folks over here, I want you guys to only mix up such ingredients as I command you:
Flour, milk, shorting, butter, sugar, apples, and salt and water (and I command you to only substitute healthy alternatives) as needed. You can mix it up and bake it, or fry it or whatever works out best however you want. But its an abomination to add or take away any word of this commandment anything, but cinnamon to that. And never, ever add black pepper, though it looks like cinnamon, or you will be damned.
To another limited and poor group only potatoes, salt, butter milk and sour cream are allowed by God’s commandments.
Others have to sacrifice a turkey, and roast it in some exclusive way that does includes black pepper and does not include cinnamon. As a matter of fact cinnamon is forbidden.
God is crazy.
Isn’t He the same yesterday today, and forever? Isn’t He supposed to give the same commandments? Isn’t there a rule somewere?
That and isn’t there a great banquette prepared in our Father’s house for The Faithful?
Yep. It looks that way.
And I’ll be damned by all if I bring peppered apple pie to it. And you’ll be damned by all, if you bring pepper in your pumpkin pie,too. And I’ll be so damned sad if there is black pepper in my pecan pie! Damn. You god damn better get it right. And I’ll be damned by everyone if I’m in charge of the gravy and I doesn’t show up with it. Or, if I add cinnamon to it instead of black pepper. I better follow the Word of God, and His Recipe for it is the same yesterday today and forever, if you are cooking up an American Thanksgiving banquette.
Everyone and Guests are welcome, I hear. But someone has to buy, organize decorate set the tables, cook and serve for it to be a party. I’m guessing the Lord of Hosts is hosting since its His house and all.
And what is a party without the drinks?
Who is bringing the drinks?
The work it takes to weave the truth of life as it is to me and I see around me into a new world intricately connected with colored beads threads metal buttons and cut just so- the renaessence again crystal, vibrant, glorious daunts! To see this, to know how to see the perfection of every part of the world; seeing the terrific battles, games and stories the exquisite glory of all the noobs the veterans blossoming the god-like diversity that make up the world i grow with and love is all I need to resort to asking god herself to show me how to express Her Life in my winding part of it all in writing.
Shrill piercing howl puppy whine.
Ha! They got it!
There they go, I’d pointed furiously silent. I’d signaled with my arm toward the sprinting pack of four evil dogs. He had been coming toward the house were I was.
He turned back around toward were I pointed. I can’t shoot that way he signaled back. There is nothing to stop the bullets. The neighbors, you know.
The dogs scattered. The shot rang out from the other direction. Friendly neighbors. They look out for us. Then, that terrible puppy in pain yapping pierced everything.
Those four goat wounding, chicken snatching, kitty killers in the pack, keep looting our fenced yard animals.
The white laying hen narrowly escaped, but her tail feathers hadn’t. The chicks didn’t. The golden, hen and her chicks didn’t.
We rescued Daisy. She was the slowest the smallest of our little goats. Those dogs had her surrounded. They were snapping at her furry legs when we reached the hysterical barking, and bleating. We ran to her, ran shouting those predators away.
Three dogs escaped.
A smallish black, and white border collie mix flinches in a horrid way, filling the stillness between shots with this squashed puppy, shrill howl.
Even saying “border-collie-mix” crams my heart in my shrinking throat.
Nothing feels safer.
I feel worse.
Can’t watch this puppy massacre.
Can’t watch them tear up the other animals, either.
Those bad dogs had caught, and tore up the half-grown kittens in the middle of the night. That piercing yawall of caught, crushed kitty, from the night before, it echoes- a scream going on and on.
I need this unbearable sound to stop. We’d found the tiny white once silky body torn up out near the pond. Not fluffy.
A dead little border collie mix, all black white and furry, doesn’t make it better. I can’t look back there.
It’s worse! I know what it looks like, what that puppy looks like, while I”m running away. I’m worse. The world is worse. There is no hope for any of us!
Weeping, running away, I’m seeing the little thing flinch, and whimper. It squealed just like Skinny Bones squealed under the bump of the pick-up truck tires.
He had fallen, gotten up, run a few steps, just enough so my heart rises up. Then fell to his side, irrevocably still. Thud.
That thud, I fled from it.
But, it didn’t flee from me. It must have happened while I was running to the house, out of control, tears streaming through the air behind me. Two more shots, thud. It happened. The thud was worse when I imagine it.
Thud.
This thud, infinitely worse than the torn up stiff bodies of kittens; more desolate than the missing hens; sadder than no more chicks.
He comes back with a firm step.
We did it! Don’t think those damn dogs will be back here on our land messing with our animals again.
I’m defeated. These are puppies, and chickies.
There is no solution. I can’t see.
There is no hope. It’s woman and children dying, and being defended by fathers, and brothers of dogs, and men turning mothers into widows, and children into survivors.
My kind, we haven’t even managed to make peace for pets.
((((
THUD!
))))
The naked part. The chooser of play hard- all in. Now in total nakedness. The fool. Poor naked poet. The Chaucer. still plays, and may bet them clothes again. Then raise the stakes, and wreak havoc. Counterfeit outdated currency, and legitimacy. Adventure this non-existent world.
Then living it, so creating it, new currency and all.
The naked part, the one who chose to play hard; go all in. She is the one who lost the bra off my back and bouncing front. Now its total nakedness. The fool. Poor naked poet. A Chaucer. Still a player, she may yet bet the outfit. Still, she is adding scope to the truth. counterfeiting outdated currency. Falsifying current legitimacy requirements. Bridging the unknown till finding yourself on the inside witnessing, unfolding into story. Recreating the parts of legend. The birth of heroes, super and un. She invites you to adventure in this non-existent world.
Then, be surprised when existence happens, legend is alive, myth is you. You live in a new world.
Or, look down on your naked.
Mercury invites. I am mercury.
My daughter attends a terrific, not even-imaginary-guns-allowed, charter elementary school.
by chance, a day when lots of teachers were on cut back leave, and there was an adventure boy accident, I ended up volunteering to take over a days art classes for k-3.
to start out the class, we sat in a circle and I asked each child his or her name, to name one favorite thing.
what is your favorite thing?
violence.
the word violence actually came after: “My favorite thing is…” at first, the word violence wasn’t the way boys described their favorites: my wii, shooting things on the computer, blowing things up. hands pulling triggers, at squint-eyed aimed at targets. violent arm waving booming explosions. the word violence wasn’t the only way violence was expressed. Other words, guns, wrestling, sports, playing cowboys, and indians, violent video games, video games, movies, violent movies. some boys liked movies. some boys specified violent movies.
when one boy took the lead to up the unsuccessfully concealed horror on face of that substitute teacher, the next boys spiraled into the glee of taking it to the next level. that’s how I got eight year old boys stating complete sentences like: “my favorite thing is violence with guns.”
It was an ice braking activity.
the way I was challenged by the boys to listen to the limit of their boyish imaginations was a kind of violence, a risky exciting game.
the famous substitute treatment.
fair.
The Eve was framed bumper sticker inspired that one.
The idea though, well that’s a different inspiration, or would I have to say temptation? Wht is the difference between inspiration and temptation anyway?
Doesn’t God inspire, the other one tempt?
how different are the two?
If you had to choose one, would you rather be tempted or inspired?
I guess in a strip club, I’d prefer inspired. But in the bedroom, tempted is better.
The wonder is how we can stand to exist with halve the visceral engaging delights of life chunked in to one bunch of stereotyped stuff. Key word seems to be “exist”. Lets just exist. Survive, perhaps like roaches or any careful or robust species destined to survive weather surviving is worth it or not.
If it is worth it. And we did all the protective bomb shelter, don’t be tempted out stuff to survive. Well have we already survived. What indicated survival?
What if we have to come out and look around and notice that danger is over and we can aloow ourselves to be tempted again.
The devil was just the boogie man that kept us aware that there is danger. Some things, like alcohol to alcoholics must be completely avoided. For this terrific group this is a great plan. The rest of us can enjoy our buzz though.
I guess all these little differences, everyone’s cryptonite gets lumped under Devil then chunked on to this one shady character Lucifer The Morning Star. Or the Son of the Morning. Is that becuse the morning conceives him, gestates all day and gives birth to darkness?
Mob y Dick
mob: wild fire tearing ravageing through institutions, and government
dick. the institutionalized right thing to do burned through by mob
white whale
white elephant
whale hunters obsessed with hunting destroying moby dick
the carcass of an edible giant fish dragged home picked clean, and white
priceless, and unsellable, oh wait, non-monetizable- dirty word.
third choice
Unlikely
lets go back to moby and dick at least we know that game
cain and able
cowboys and indians
cops and robbers
knight against dragon
shrek a grown up fairy tale
mob bad-kidnappings, extortion, insecurity, murder, lawlessness, ( ha ha!)
dick bad-corporate, law, scripted perfection, death by inertia, inconsequence, status quo, spare-part-hood.
Murder or kidnap me
child games
what is the question?
what are delightful grownup games?
runescape an easy answer
Your answer?
Super heroes have lots of options. Say you were a super hero and you had some choices like…
A. Flick your pinkie toppleing your unworthy adversary then go back to being bored.
B. Not have an adversary at all. Why bother. Just relax and know you are Super.
C-Z. Forget that you are Super, and dream of being happy. So you can somehow get the hell out of the crap you are in. Then you love someone. “Oh, hell no!” when your love is challenged beyond what yo can stand. So you stand up. That’s when yo realize that you were born or bitten or channeled or visited or ordained or, traded at birth, and you are really powerful, super and a whole family, kingdom and power you had never heard of is on your side cheering, adoring you backing you up. You discover you are their future, their only hope, and the hope of the world that your love lives in, and well the rest is history. I mean story. Myth. Comic strip. Hollywood. Magical. Captivating.
It’s the same boring thing over and over.
Over and over. The kid discovers he is not the weakling he thought he was. He becomes more after he falls in love. Grows into being invincible by mistake, and rescues the female who is the key somehow to the whole story. He is a super man now. She is loved, and super.
I’m bored already looking at this. What is new under the sun?
Then when the next Avatar comes out, I’m wafted off to that cloudy place again. The magical whimsies of the kid wizards, and computer geniuses coming back from the future with solutions to unhappiness, and farm boys turned radical pirate princes out of adoration of a princess, or kids having the secret key that will undestroy the world as we know and love it (some days) and like magic, its all new again. Till the awakening jolt of realization. That Myth is old recycled. Its just that bit of freshness there that got you. That twist of say the Ancient Greek Gods and Mount Olimpus are up with the times alive and well in NY City, of-course, and And completely unexpected but, obvious, once you think about it, Hades is at Hollywood.
Duh.
And somehow I’ll be happy to find out the next unimaginable fantasy, taken and thrilled or laughing at the unscrupulous imagination of it. Then wonder, if that were true mythically of course, what would be going on here?
And when my love is challenged, what have I done? Why do these stories thrill kids all over the world and the kid in me?
What would I do If I were a god?
What about a god kid?
What about a human?
What am I?
What do I care about?
Then I remembered.
On the way to my brother’s wedding, from Austin to California, my sister and I stopped off to visit our dear friend Eva in Phoenix. We had driven all night. With a few hours of rest at a rest stop. We hadn’t planned out our trip. When we came to a Dark smoky motel at a truck stop, tired and really to sleep, the prospect of going in there felt less appealing than driving on. The long dessert stretch through the the invisible flatlands of Texas to new Mexico, came to life with Salsa music dancing in the seats from relif of not being locked away in that dim place and on to Eva’s! We could spend a whole day, and night with her this way. The rest stop felt deserted and friendly, cozy and crowded all at the same time. And we couldn’t keep our eyes open anyway, till dawn was in our eyes.
In mid afternoon, I drove up to were Eva’s house was supposed to be in Gaby’s memory. I think it’s this house.
No, the next house. Wait, I don’t remember that house being built there. No wiat. That was it. Stop. We are here. That house just wasn’t being built right there. We were in front of a practical well kept suburban Phoenix house with a wide front, driveway to a garage a front lawn, the usual wooden privacy fence, we half passed up her house when Gaby said: Oh heah that was her house. The car stopped in front of the fence at the curb halve way into the empty lot where the soon to be house next door would build their privacy fence. I sighed with tired relief to be here at last, and looked up to turn back and survay Eva’s new place in this town when I saw a man slip into the empty space between the house and the new building. I think he came out of Eva’s fence.
Hey Gaby, is that her new man? He looked a little bit old for her. It wasn’t her dad, I know her dad. It’s not a fit with anybody I know in her circle or even the new friends I know about. Gaby looks up. No, that’s not her man.
Do you know him?
No. Why should I know him?
Well, He might have just walked out of Eva’s fence. The idea confused me. The scene didn’t translate. A man is his late 40’s or so walked from somewhere in the area of Eva’s fence, perhaps behind her house then…and to the construction site next door. Usually men turn and look at pretty young woman in our early 30s who drive up to their homes or work places, at least notice. This guy didn’t turn his head. He looked straight ahead.
The construction cite was littered with bags of cement, hoses, tools, buckets, like a place deserted for lunch hour by workmen ready to come back and work on the lawn fixtures after lunch or a weekend project abandoned from exhaustion. The man walked over tho the cite, surveyed it like it was his. Picked up a bucket like it was his and carried it to the front of the yard, put it down like he wanted it there. He reached down for a hose and carried it to another spot. I vaguely wondered what he was working on, what the project was. The hose was not turned on. The bucket was placed randomly. He picked up something else and placed it down randomly somewhere else. I got zero gratification form figuring out what he was working on. You know that feeling oh, I’m smart I figured he was gonna wet a pile of cement, or aha that is a landscaping rock garden he is working on I can tell by were he put that hose, then that bucket then that tool, or whatever, so I’d stop wondering, get bored, get out of the car. There was no rush. My but was tired. Eva was gone to work, her sweet little Lavi was at the per-school she was so proud for her to attend, where they let kids be themselves just like Eva is, and her parents were with her. We had talked about it over the phone, and email. Now I was finally going to meet her daughter. She was pregnant last we saw each other. I can’t wait till she gets home. I’m imagining feeling, carried away with a dream of Eva, this baby. This baby. My baby was 5 years old sitting in the back seat. We had been pregnant together. Best friends, roommates. The best summer of my life, then we were so happy to be going to deliver six weeks apart. I got a baby out of the deal. she had gotten a broken heart and a son, and the memory of a son. Now we had that in common. When the doctor told her her son would not live. I know how to be there for her. My son had not lived either. Now we both had daughters. Mine two years older than hers. And I couldn’t wait to meet…What, hmmmhh, why did that guy just move that cinder block from there to there? What is going on here? My mind drifted in a cloudy loop of nothing to go on and no were to go, nothing made sense. I stared int space, closed my eyes…I’ll get out in a minute, Gaby, you go ahead. She hesitated, sat back in the seat, started collecting empty containers and CDs and putting things back into her backpack folding folding her sweater. Transfixed by nothing, I’m transported to that place of stillness for an instant, sorta a place I used to work so hard to find, were everything makes sense for a minute, or ceases to matter when its to much to bear. I didn’t know I’d gone there, since usually it was a dire situation, or allot of pain that would force me to surrender and seek quite to be able to breath or just die.
She is mine!
You can’t touch her!
She is Mine because I love her. You can’t touch her.
The first words boomed commanding. Shocked me.
The second words stated the obvious. confirmed the absolute with the complete unquestioned authority. Was final, didn’t surprise me at all. Of course. Practically duh.
Then I was a weary traveler in my car.
There is something fishy about that guy Gaby. What he is doing doesn’t make sense. And he seemed to come out of Eva’s fence I think that’s what I saw.
What should we do?
He was suddenly on a bicycle starting away from the yard driving by us, past us, with his face turned at full attention on the empty front yard across the street; the only movement on the quiet, long, desert coldisac in a working neighborhood in middle of the working day he didn’t notice. We weren’t there.
What should we do? Should we tell Eva? I looked at Gaby. The words said themselves. I have done what I need to do. You decide what you want to do and do it, tell Eva or call the police or whatever. You do what you think needs to be done.
I’m done with this. It flashed as final as the authority of the feeing.
I’d forgotten all about it, when the next day, our girls were playing in the water out in the back yard and the side gate was unlatched. I observed. Lavi, to small to reach that latch. Unlatched gate with a toddler, didn’t feel like Eva. Nope, not a dad either. I latched it, and told Eva it had been unlatched, and just ajar. Guess she couldn’t register that kind of information cuz she stared blankly not registering the unimaginable for an instant, just as I had done.
I don’t think she believed me. I latched it. Or registered. It was more weirdness, that registered as nothing, cuz I’d totally let it rest and forgotten and it seemed unaccessible to her consciousness now that I think about it.
Eva took me to visit her daughter’s school and meet her teachers. WE were delighted together to have found the same kind of school for our girls. And just delighted that we had girls together. Her gold bracelet, with Isaac engraved on it, was in a little box on her dresser. I only wear it sometimes now. You know. Because he matters. I have Lavi now, but he matters, too. She Sparkled again, like she did that summer when we cooked, and talked almost every evening, and she told me about her Nana, a witch, who never did stop hanging out with her husband, after he died suddenly. After years of her having coffee and conversations with him every morning, sometimes really getting after him for being so stubborn, the grandkids would ask what he said this time, and she’d tell them. He is just as stubborn as when he was alive. And she got frustrated with him and would go off like the old Mexican lady’s do when men, and children are stubborn, and unreasonable, like her dear husband, and after after all these years too! She was indignant one minute, and glad he kept his word to never leave her the next. Eva kept her things that she had left for her, and our little apartment was adorned with her vase, her silverware was in the drawer, her glassware in the cupboard. Next to my favorite alter things where hers, her Nana’s, and they fit together perfectly. She said her Nana could be with us too, like her Tata was, with her, and sometimes she felt her. She asked me to not be sad when she died. She was happy here, and she would be happy with her husband there, and still care for Eva. To keep her stuff, and enjoy it, like she did, and she would be present with her in her things. So Eva’s Nana visited us, and I loved her in all her unusual being and let her be alive in our home. I felt her love in the turquoise dishtowels embroidered with colorful abstract Mexican cross stitch flowers. The huge orange and yellow seventies flowers on the stoneware, that was hers, made me smile to be born about the time she got these and she has loved them for as long as I’ve been alive. And she loves Eva, with care left for me, and I love her serving plates and I love her, and I love her love story, of how a boy of fourteen saw a girl of eight, and new instantly. I will marry her. Then waited until she, rare in her day, and community, graduated from secretary school, having wooed her since she came of age, and promised to wait till she was ready, to ask her to marry him. I loved him too. And the wild son they had. The wonder man master of both Mexico, and American balancing being completely both, like I’d never seen done, and a strong gregarious outspoken man. That man had Eva, and the world is perfect. She is my friend. I belong to her, to her stories, and to her Nana. Her Nana belongs to me, just like like she does to her. It was a feeling I never described, or thought to describe, but was so strong it filled the summer like a cool ocean, and made me part of the world, that I’d never belonged to before. Now, I belonged to this ocean, in this ocean, it is me, and mine–It’s mine, because I love it.
The wedding was fun. I reveled with my family, cried without even wondering why, as my brother walked away down the isle in the grass of the back garden of his bride’s home, danced like a dervish, and drove my halve of the way back to Austin. All night, just to be thrilled again, to giggle and laugh as we drove by the spooked motel, beating the steering wheel with my palms, and the seat with my hips to La Got Fria.
It was so good to be back in my own bed. My eyes were less heavy. It was 6am. We laughed, and promised to do it again soon.
Work was fun and hot and challenging. Gaby, and I met for coffee, to talk and thrill about the adventures in our life’s and how we are changing, how magic seems to be everywhere. Serendipity. Close calls, excitement, chance meetings, Delightful people. We’d met often to splash our stories at each other like toddlers in a pool, for a while now. Since we both felt this strange new world alive in, and around us, like we were alone in this pool in our back yard, together.
Jess, did Eva call you?
No.
She didn’t.
Oh my god, she called me.
She was out of her mind, freaking out, terrified.
What the hell?
An officer knocked on her door.
Get you child and leave your house right now. We can’t ensure your safety.
She left. She could never get herself to go back to that house again. Even after….
God damn! Everytime the media writes almost anything about Mormons in national media except for the new “I am a Mormon” campaign, it is usually makes zero sense from pretty much start to finish.
Reporters what the hell are you thinking?
You are’t.
Yesterday sitting down to write up a profile for a local buisness, I suddenly realized. I am now the evil media. It’s that here is this story I have to come up with based on these boring facts. What do you write about a title company. How bout making a roofing company look good? Someone has to want to watch this. Wow roofing. Wow, umh title company. That’s how I know I’m the evil media, cuz I have all theses facts that who the hell knows why they are important, and I have to make something interesting with zero understanding of how this is important or meaningfull except well, roofs go on houses, titles go to houses. Houses are good. I like houses. I need some searious help here. So, I go to interview the people… I realize that these title companies omg life saver! When I buy my first house, which I have been putting off thinking about cuz its so much paper trouble…well, they gave me freedom to imagine a pleasant home buying experiance. When I get my roof replaced. Almose looking forward to it just becouse these guys exsist, I’m totally choosing this roofing company. I can work with this and show the truth in a short comercial. However all the evil media writers who wrote those first storys about Mormons or Mormon offspring, I mean offspring, not offshoot htere was no way to get the kind of interview perspective that I got. They had to produce out of thin air, something pople wanted to read. I’m not sure about the first ones way back in the 1800s, but when some young reporter got a headline today story of completly wierd news of unimaginable circumstances, and events there was no one to interview that made any kind of sence to get to understand what was going on. If I were the reporter who had to get out a story flawlwssly edited for the evening news, I would have invented whatever story I could and, made it interesting, speculated, tried to get the footage on it, got it to my station on time, with zero added perspective or understanding, too. Very evil of me.
So, what do I want to do now? Never really expected to be alive this long. Which doesn’t go well at all, with having always known when I’m going to die. That, and asking to die, and, negotiating my death with God. I don’t know how many seven-year olds do that. Then, there was the time being dragged by the rapids around the bend, into the crushing wall in the Rio Yaqui, when my life passed before my eyes. I’d miss Tuffy, and he would miss me. I’ll be missed?
Swim!
Her order broke my surrender. Life quite passing before me.
Her hand, finally after chasing me down after several strained reaches, she just caught my hand where I managed to reach out. the current dominated. and then loosed up just enough for my fingers to take hold of hers and swing me with the current closer to shoure. the last rock before the bend cascades the water through rocks tearing in the shalows that wer to fast to think in. She had run down stream from where she managed to get out, way before me. when she was bossy, I futily obayed, while it felt impossible the whole tim. I tried, and reached it. Then, it was shaking all over, and feeling tht was to easy to be shaking all over. We beat death and it was nothing.
Then the time I’d made up my mind to take my self out, just on principle. We said we’d all go down together. But if I was going down of myself, I made up my own damn mind. I’m not taking anyone down with me. But, God’s law against suicide got in the way this time again. The time before, it hadn’t. I guess it was that child like faith. because I knew I’d be given whatever I asked for, then. But this time, well it’s not like that. The prayers of the wicked are not heard, so I don’t have any of those, options. And all the delight in my prayer being answered that time, the instantaneous comprehension of the purpose of my life, is the light. It leaves when your mind gets dark. which is obviously the case, or I could remember. For sure the devil has me, and I’ll be turned over to the buffetings of Satan, very soon, if I don’t do something. My blood must be atoned. Which is a stupid thing to have to ask Jenny or someone to do. Just becouse she promised to if it came to this. Does’t mean I want her to have to. I’ll just do it myself before she has to try fo figure it out. I’m gonna figure out how to do it myself. God wasn’t giving me a free suicide out though. And those promises must have vanished when I started sinning against light, cuz all I can see is the curses being fulfilled, that will only spread faster, and get me worse and worse till I actually start to want to fight for my life. And it may infect everyone. Then the whole world will be doomed, or it will be even harder for whoever has to set up the kingdom to accomplish it. Fighting for my life, well, I’m not that darkminded…..yet. So, I’ll do it quick and easy. No one else has to get in trouble, or go to jail over it, or be chased around by the policeand tried, and stuff. I hate that. When You get darkminded, first thing that happens is that you don’t care if you get God’s people in trouble for keeping his commandmonts. Can’t imagine getting tht dumb, but, I’ve seen it happen. I’m not sure how anyone could be so stupid, but that’s what being darkminded does. And I don’t want it to happen to me.
I could dig a whole and put myself in.
But how would I bury myself. So, I’m down in this hole I dug. Where do I get a shovel? How long with this thing take to dig? Where will I dig it? Is there anywhere on Cerro de la Silla were people never go? How long would it take to get there, and could I do this in one trip or will there have to be more? If it took me a few days of digging, how do I keep all the neighborhood boys from following me, and finding out what I’m doing. Oh, and I think burying myself alive so that I died, would still be suicide, by burial. Shit.
I could get some one to come, and shoot me. It would really be horrible to have to bury myself alive. Technically, that would be skipping killing, suicideing, and going straight to the burying part. So, I would have buried myself, not killed myself. I read about being buried alive in the Reader’s Digest though, it gave me the worse creeps and I shivered a few times a day, just from imagining it. Didn’t know if that was worse, or being burned alive like Abinidi. and I mean that was a nightmare for weeks. I knew I had to be ready to do or alow what ever God called me to do. Then, when I read about Abinidi the Prophet being burned for prophisying against the people, and I pretty much know that, that is what is usually going to happen to prophets, like dad, and me, if I wanted to live up to my calling, I’d have to be willing to be burned alive like Abinidi, if that is what it took, and it likely would cuz these are the last days, and it’s prophisied that it will get even harder than ever, but I can’t think of anything harder that Abinidi through, umm except getting nailed to the cross. Then for several nights I woke up out in my tree house and cachenilla hut and running, running away from being called to give my hands for nails to be pounded into them. Spent some time in the storage room by myself with a hammer and a big shiny nail and a rusty nail, wondering which would hurt worse, and even kinda making a wimpy attempt. remembering how those attempts to see how a nail through the palm felt, so I wouldnt be a friend anymore didn’t add anything to my confidence that I could pull this off. It would be a failure all over again, like so many attempt to see if I was brave enough to take it. I wasn’t brave enough to stab a knife in my stomach. Tried that. I’m not brave. I’d chicken out. I’m my dreams, I finally quite running, and said okay, okay you can burn me or pound nails im my hands if that is what God requires, and I was feeling like it was about to be done, and I didn’t chicken out, or run anymore, and I woke up so relieved that I wasn’t on fire and didn’t have nails in my hands and feet, and moreover, no one was eminently trying to do it. Thankfulness overwhelmed me, I prayed in thanks and then and there decided to be happy that I wasn’t having to do that now, and have fun, allot before I had to go there.
really suck, and I think it would still be considered suicide. None of this is working.
Right in the middle of the night, after a long unthoughtful flirtation with a feeling, this is what its come to.
The end.
Waywardspirit
waywardspirit 
