the first week of warmth

night 1...
When you've been inside all day, and trying unsuccessfully to cut down on your caffeine intake, and it's beautiful out, you get the itch to start thinking and exist with others, and I don't know him well, there's nothing like that going on, but an exchange of ideas was needed. We changed our plans the other night and walked from my house down to the water, instead of getting coffee, which probably would have been awkward and datey. We were talking about art and God and this strange hovering between the embrace of subculture and the spiritual community that alternately nourishes and frustrates.

The sunlight was fading by the time we reached the beach, staring out over the empty sand to the lavender water and the pink sky enraptured by not the most picturesque sunset, but a peaceful understated one. There's something wonderful about the near-empty beach in the twilight.

I don't come down here much, he says.
All my greatest memories happened here, I say. There's always something to remember here.

We run into people he knows, foment plans of the creative kind that my skeptical self finds myself questioning a few days later. As we walk back, a group of kids sets off a hot air balloon lit from one of the grills, and it looks like a burning heart soaring away through the darkness. It sounds twee of me to say this but there was something very beautiful about it. We walked back and I took him past this giant thicket of bamboo by one of the mansions where all the birds live, and we listened to the rustle and the singing before walking back to my front yard and going our separate ways.

night 2...
The next night I have dinner on the porch with the usual suspects and then go out for a friend's birthday and miss dinner with them but end up at a pub I like with a group of her friends, most of whom I barely know. The can of Strongbow I'm drinking usually doesn't do much to my equilibrium but I knew I was a little more tipsy than usual and a little hazy so I don't say as much for a change. Most of the time when I have a drink either alcoholic or caffeinated I end up going on long ramblings about Balkan geopolitics or my beef with most urban planners or foreign policy or the intricacies of sundry music or religion but I'm not feeling like doing that this time. It's too loud in here, and these people are neither total strangers nor close friends.

I get introverted in gatherings like these and either become a total wallflower or Mary Contrary. I either say nothing or start talking about how awesome inner-ring suburbs are, and how Lynyrd Skynyrd is better than your favorite indie rock band, that the guy you voted for sucks, and how I love driving my car and riding bikes scares me.

But as such, people keep telling me stories that they think I'll find funny but I don't find them funny and feel bad because I'm not amused, they're not realizing that I'm really not as cool as I evidently come across to those that don't know better. I don't want to be impressed, I almost feel embarrassed for you when you try to do it. I just want you to be yourself, and not drop f-bombs because you think I'm tough, not try to impress me by pointing out the dudes at the bar who are probably into Nickelback, because who cares.

My theory is that alpha males overcompensate by talking about the geeky dweebs or extolling their physical prowess and their fast cars, beta males overcompensate by talking about how dumb alpha male bros are and try to impress you with their record collections, knowledge of local restaurants, smartphone capabilities and their swank bikes. Bros will be bros and geeks will be geeks. I'm usually not this magnanimous, and I know that high school never ends, but this is getting old and so are you. It must be the hard cider talking.

night 3... 
I end up working late and decide not to do anything social. I work in the garden until sunset, marvel at the seedlings poking up through the soil that will be spinach and chard, and walk to the corner store past kids playing in the apartment building parking lot, the EMTs in the garage relaxing on lawn chairs, and the crowds at the punk bar and the old-man-gay-bar. It's a beautiful night, and I feel safe because there's so many other people around.

One of my friends had a former roommate who needs a place to stay for a month or three, and doesn't know that many people over here or have a lot of cash, since she's from Ethiopia, working at a gas station, and going to nursing school. I have an extra room at my place for the purposes of art making and having a place where people can stay, so we talk tonight and negotiate out shares of utilities. I haven't had a roommate since the crash-and-burn of the previous domestic situation, but I know this has a limited timetable and I'm feeling ready.

But now I need to figure out how to consolidate two rooms worth of bachelorette living into one. Furniture starts getting moved and rearranged. I find some things I can throw away, or try to give away. It gets later than I thought, but the feral cats in the yard are fighting so it takes awhile to fall asleep as it is.

night 4...
I have an extra bed in the spare room that I was going to try and cram in a corner somewhere but a friend's friend just moved down the street from me and needs something to sleep on, so he comes over, decides it's perfect, and we cram the mattress into his hatchback just barely. The boxspring won't fit, however, so on our second trip we end up deciding to tie it to the roof of my car hillbilly style, with two dry-rotted bits of clothesline I find in the garage. It's a long and slow couple miles up the street with him holding onto the rope for dear life and me hoping this doesn't slide down onto my windshield. I'm sure it provides amusement for the onlookers.

His new place is full of guitars and drums and bikes and records and roommates. They play in a band or something, and they invite me to stay for dinner. I go home and bring over an attempt at sweet potato fries that doesn't work but still tastes good, and a bowl of hummus. They grill me some amazing steak and onions and we sit on a patio over a storefront that reminds me of friends' photos of rooftop Brooklyn parties, listening to My Bloody Valentine and I feel like I've known them all my life, it's that comfortable and weirdness-free. I'm amazed that we see so many stars considering that there's car dealerships on the other sides of the walls that aren't old apartment buildings.

I'm on a mission to never agree

So everyone's getting all "woo equality" on the social networking wing of the Internet, and I'm sitting here watching folks brag about how they're so much more enlightened than this person or that person and so on and so forth, and the usual suspects are getting really sanctimonious, and I just find red and pink to be a color scheme that looks kind of ugly, so I've just been clicking the little 'hide' button and considering how the Human Rights Campaign is a bit of a misnomer.

And don't get me wrong, I'm cool with civil unions and domestic partnerships and marriage and whatever. I honestly don't think the state has any business saying who can and can't between consenting adults but I understand that the legality as such has implications when it comes to legal stuff like kids and hospital visits and whatnot. I wouldn't want to deny that to anyone. I also don't believe that morality can be legislated.

But as far as human rights go... even if gay marriage in some aspect is legalized here, our foreign policy helps prop up regimes that stone you for adultery and have brutal ways of treating folks who swing the other way unless it's somehow already culturally sanctioned. If we're going to talk about equality and human rights, what about our prison system, or our schools, or the disparity in sentencing between cocaine and crack, or that Gitmo is STILL OPEN, and the School of the Americas has just been rebranded, but continues to export terrorism, and that we're STILL AT WAR and bombing the hell out of other countries on top of that, or teaching people how to brutally treat their own and exporting weapons to countries to help them keep people continually marginalized (see: Israel/Palestine, Uganda, etc).

And so I can't help but feel this is a giant smoke screen, a bone to throw the people who voted for hope and change, a way to get the masses riled against each other while the war machine keeps turning. And everyone buys in.

longing for perfection

That time of the day when the blood sugar plummets, the clownery escalates, and yours truly fails to suffer fools gladly, the effervescent smile fading and I fail to camouflage emotions well without it, especially when dealing with all manner of absurdity in the form of general creeps or dudes whose game is being needy as hell which is not cute or endearing and gives me the airplane ears like few other things.

 When it's nothing too awful I should really suck it up, and I always feel so guilty after being bitchy even if it's warranted, there's no excuse to dish it back and no one looks good. I don't consider myself a perfectionist but I guess I am, in the sense that I really don't want to be a jerk and also I really don't want to get blowback from further ups who make mountains out of every available molehill either because that does happen, and the insecure's ego gets bruised most easily. So I'm sorry dudes. I should be more patient and gracious and hope that someday you grow up. And on my side, I need to not beat myself up so much and just try to minimize the jerkitude on my end. It was nothing bad, it just could be better.

the best-laid plans

Getting new winter tires turned into a debacle of sorts as I got my car back all rattling and roaring in ways that it wasn't before. Some might sneer at my love of my vehicle, but this money pit has been the source of some degree of social life for yours truly that would have been made much more complicated by can you pick me up? I can help friends move, and go see bands, and venture out to places unknown, and get from one end of Clevelandia to another when it's not shaking away.

One of my homies celebrates his 30th tonight, and I wish I could be there to laugh at him and congratulate him for living longer than Cobain and Morrison, and hang out in the outer boonie eastern burbs, but I fear driving alone out there with such a dubious ride and don't want to be calling for help off some godforsaken exurb road. .

All was not lost as a previous roommate and his friends called me up and we met at the lovely West Side Market, now a foodie mecca and a mess of traffic, but despite my grousing, I'm glad to see people there rather than not. Took the train down and we bought sundry goodnesses of produce and the men cooked in the kitchen and me and the girlfriends sat in the living room talking politics and history, generating much mutual snark of the sexes.

I cook mostly vegan for myself for economic and ew-raw-meat reasons, but cannot refuse such goodness as homemade stew of fresh vegetables and meat, succulent in beer and homemade stock, roasted corn and pumpkin gnocchi, blackberries and cream, we toast to friendship and his dead bassett hound,  wine gave way to mead, a bottle of dizzying fire-honey which was emptied between the seven of us and stories are told, and laughter is great, and we're all suddenly sleepy, the internet at the bibliotheque provides no great insights into automotive matters, too many creeps up here anyway. It'll be an early night, but it was such a beautiful day.

things and people

There is something about being in an unfamiliar place that used to scare the daylights out of me, but now, with some degree of fiat, knowing that I have my car parked out front to take me away if it gets lame, knowing that I'm never stuck, it's made me more bold, and I take more things into consideration, if only for anthropological observing. The National Geographic narrator voice deep within my psyche kicks in as I observe the cultural habits and mating rituals of some tribe or another, be it in exurbia where there's a minivan in every driveway and chinos on ever male over thirty, or a swank condo with a glittering view of downtown where I am profoundly underdressed in the punk rock t-shirt in a sea of party dresses and sweaters, one drink (and one drink only as I designated-drove and I'm all Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary somehow going on about how the garden grows is important as hell. 

 Don't get me wrong, I've got little patience for the local food cultists, but I do think that we need both the city and the country to exist. Cities where everyone moves tend to be awful and difficult places for the poor and middle-class who become poor by default: see almost any Real City anywhere: Mumbai, Shanghai, Dubai, Rio, London, NYC, DC shall I go on, or places like Paris where the city is a playground for the affluent and the tourists and the immigrants and other folk are stuck in the suburbs isolated from everything.  Hell, even when my burg was really populated, life was great for the Rockefellers and Hannas, but sucked pretty bad for most of the working schlubs crowded into slums and ethnic ghettos, getting poisoned by factory smokestacks and sick when the slaughterhouse reek blew downwind. No wonder people wanted to get the hell out.  THIS IS WHY PEOPLE MOVED TO PARMASTAN FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, this is why the suburbs existed even before white flight.  

I'll probably be a city kid til the day I die, but I understand why people live in the suburbs, or why people live in the country, and that even if we go back to a mythological "way things were" that things won't be any better. Sure, there were streetcars back then that ran all over the city, but my grandpa was picking up coal from the railroad tracks so they could be warm, my grandma came up here to work as a domestic and then quit to work in a factory after the man of the house tried to take advantage of her. This was the way it was, and neither of them ever talked about "the good old days."

 But I read too much, and I'm not very cool, and I'm not voting for Obama and even though I take the bus to work, I love driving my car because it helps me help out other people and gets me from my house to Parmastan to see the folks and shows that I go to by myself, and home from places after dark where the bus doesn't run. I had no social life before then, and it's made life much better now even as I know that this isn't necessarily good. 

And so then Saturday, I handed out candy to kids that came through the doors at church to play games and drink hot chocolate, despite the mayor cancelling the holiday for good, 600 people came through the doors and then back out. Tangerine joined me and we decamped to the Big Egg for late night diner breakfast food, for girl-talk and life-talk and wondering why people create dubstep remixes of "Sweet Child O' Mine," and my sister's life drama hit the fan even more thanks to the Internets, though it seems such slander was redacted, and I was full of thoughts and ponderings and decided to join my old Parmastani homies for foodage and laughter to end the night and restore the equilibrium. Politics was skirted and thankfully not discussed, one more day and all this crazy will be back to the stupid normal.

What I've concluded over the past election cycle is that ultimately we as a society consider things and concepts as more important than human life or even the life of the planet. We might "buy green" but we're still conspicuously consuming, and job creation involves consumption of unnecessaries, and I know I'm complicit due to my love of books and music and art. The blood of women and children in countries that worship Allah are considered a worthy price for the freedom that we're continuing to lose, to keep the money for our student loans flowing, to maintain the cars we drive. We're willing to prop up regimes that stone women for adultery and don't allow them to drive because there's a supposed "War on Women" going on here. I kind of feel sick sometimes if I think about it too much, the lack of love and compassion and seeing outside of one's own sphere and perceived needs and comfort is profoundly disconcerting. I wish I had more love and compassion than I did.

I read some apocalyptic stuff the other night out of Ezekiel where God goes on a big rant about religious people screwing others over, and people using power and usury to take advantage of society's vulnerable, and rulers enriching themselves and their friends at the expense of the people, and those who prey on the women, the children, and the immigrant, and I can't help but think "Oh jeez that's us completely," when I think about mourners being bombed at funerals, and the cruelty shown to those who have darker skin than me who live here and work our crap jobs and speak Spanish or Arabic or whatever. The powers that perpetuate such suffering, and those of us who get enough bones thrown our way to keep them doing what they do best.
 

through restriction and repetition I'm growing old

so I thought that taking a creative writing workshop would make me write more but it hasn't. I can't write anything. I've tried, some would say maybe not enough. Even when I demarcate the hours and the caffeine to sit there nothing happens.  Nothing remotely worth sharing with the world is dribbling out of my brain.  All the streams of story have dried up and gotten tangled, khattam shud.

It's nobody's fault but mine, of course. The prompts are good, there are some gifted folks and I've got a notebook full of inspiring concepts about the craft but it's just not working, it's not working at all. At least twenty false starts in Google Docs and sundry notebooks, what the hell, I think too much and even when I try to crank it out I despise the end result so much, because I know it's not true, because if I don't like it how could anyone else?

Discontent with mediocrity, how many short stories have I read that were so uncompelling and self-consciously clever, characters I couldn't care about, incidents uninteresting, endings unsatisfactory.  How many novels that unravelled and fell apart halfway through, go all the way or not at all, and I don't have the endurance and for that honestly a sense of shame.

It's like when I've tried doing the band thing, and the songs are so profoundly mediocre that I feel the life being sucked out of me as I play the chords or basslines, why bother? Why contribute more mess and averageness. 

At least in art class you can keep throwing paint at the canvas, scrawl missives in pen and colored pencil on the canvas, collage the hell out of that trouble spot or at least smother it under a coating of white and start over again. With this it's harder to cheat. Either it's there or it's not and it's just not there.

I used to listen to a lot of Idlewild from the summer between junior and senior year all the way through my English litster undergrad and realize that they really need to make their way back into my Tuesday morning music rotations. I'm glad I caught them on their last tour through Clevelandia almost ten years ago now, because they haven't returned since and are now on hiatus. I was kind of pretentious about my punk rock back then to the point of being a jerk, but I still don't understand why this band never got big, cursed by falling through major label cracks and being a bit too brainy I guess. Songs about being socially awkward and reading books probably weren't quite as accessible maybe as songs about making out and getting cheated on. These tunes were what I once tried to write to. If only I could recapture that creative thirst again.

redundancy department of redundancy

language keeps me locked and repeating...

 
At the risk of being a broken record, will not, will not repeat until further notice. Out of sight out of mind, easier to focus on one's own little corner than the big picture. I guess we need all of us, I just wonder sometimes if I'm the one that's gone a little crazy or if everyone else has or if we all are. Those I used to consider kindred souls years ago are now so far removed, others with whom I would have had less in common at one time I find myself kindred with now. Go figure. People are still more important than things, life is more than work and career, and the world is bigger than your own personal space and your own pet issues,  and that's where so much of the priority gets screwed up all the way around. I keep trying to see outside, see and learn as much as possible which means that I end up talking about things that no one else really gives a damn about, but it is what it is. I don't know if that's a bad thing.

I open up my wallet and it's full of blood

I should have played this on the show this morning, maybe, but there's plenty of other days to be mournful and angry and I feel like I'm permanent blast because it's election season and such. Last night was my grandma's birthday and we had dinner and while my grandfather and I don't see things the same way often, as he listens to way more talk radio than yours truly and I usually have to excuse myself, we were able to agree that as a country we have sucked fantastically (my words not his) at dealing with things, sacrificing freedom for "security," ill-advised ventures into sundry parts, an absurd approach to dealing with the day-to-day, the expansion of bureaucracy, an appalling lack of reflection on the who what and why. We are prideful and cowardly as a country, we continued to pass the buck and consume with gusto, because we're not the ones who are sacrificing anything.

We should have just moved on, he says, instead we've turned it into something else to buy and that cheapens it. Who needs a memorial? Who cares if someone wants to build a mosque over there? Life goes on.

Mind you, this isn't a peacenik talking at all. This is someone who's more close ideological to Glenn Beck than Glenn Greenwald, but even he's getting fed up with all this hagiography and the flag-waving.

I wish we could have done what Norway did when dealing with a national tragedy, sure there were the platitudes of coming together, but not fearing one's neighbor, welcoming increased militarization, moving on after dealing with wackjobs with weapons, not letting it change our day-to-day. I really respect that. I wish we had done that.

And then last night I ran into my movie night/softball homies at the gas station. We watched Stripes and drank sweet tea and talked about the way things were growing up for us, the indoctrination, the propaganda, each of us is a decade removed and grew up in very different circumstances. When I was younger, my anger was more abstract, now I'm way more chilled out but there's certain things that really angry up the blood more than ever. I say, happy to be among folks who aren't fearmongering with WAR ON TERROR! WAR ON CHRISTMAS! WAR ON DRUGS! WAR ON WOMEN!

I'm fed up with people trying to scare me. I'm fed up with other people being screwed over in order to maintain an unsustainable way of living that's starting to unravel. I can't be around the party-line-towers on either side because I find myself far to the ends of either of them. I want election season to be over, because I'm sick of the propaganda and the fact that my whole adult life has been a national nightmare. 

The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this:

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days"

You grabbed my hand
And we fell into it
Like a daydream
Or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood

house of mourning

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.

I came from work pretty much, finding my way to a small funeral home on Lorain wondering at first what I was doing here, until there were some familiar faces. I'm so used to the Catholic way of doing this things, but someone sang a gospel song and then a couple pastors spoke and everyone fanned themselves with their programs and babies cried, the place was packed out with family and friends. I wondered if there was any point in being there, but as I talked to the few I did know, I realized that sometimes just being there, being willing to listen and sometimes hug, might be what the point of this is. These are for the living after all.

It's hard for me to look at the despirited body like an empty shell, and her family crying in the front row, we return to the church for a meal and then people sing her favorite songs and tell stories and remember her. People talk about her garden and the way she played the guitar and her struggles that are now over. There's a whole tapestry of family history unfurling in front of me, and being somewhat outside the immediate orbit, I wish now that I could have celebrated with her more in life than remembering what little scraps I have after she's gone.

There's a part of me that's still extremely shy and somewhat skittish, I don't even know where to start with people sometimes, and I don't know if the invitations of hospitality are true or just talk, and in her case it seems they were true. It's been a week, maybe even a summer of grieving for a lot of people in my world, losing friends and their friends losing kids, and kids losing parents. I look at her parents and wonder what it's like to bury a daughter. It makes me realize that I need to love more, that somewhere in the last few years I've lost some of the generous spirit that I once had, because getting burned will do that, but to do more, be more, than I was.

the day the city died

Book discussing veered more tangential this time around, the rain pouring down night and morning, punctuating coffeekvetching with the ladies of the family and the sport of slackers and post-loss food and hanging out, a Sunday afternoon under shady trees with friends and frolicking canines and children, everyone ignoring the sign saying water quality is 'poor' because when hasn't it been, attempting to deflect the attentions of the neighbor who's working on the porch for my landlady and complains about it to me all the time and wants to hang out because it's obvious that I'm not seeing anyone and all.

Not so sure to put it mildly that I really want to have "a couple beers" and such with a dude who has a kid and baby mama drama that's involved him screaming at the lady on the next street over and calling her a hillbilly whore, and whose body is covered with bad tattoos and bar fight scars, who gets all offended when I say I'm on my way out to meet up with some friends and can't hang. I wish I could be more assertive but he's already been drinking and is a whiny shade too close to belligerent and him taking five minutes a few weeks ago to pump up my flat bike tire evidently means wanting something in return so I stay diplomatic, make the quick exit and try not to feel super creeped out.

But it's a beautiful night and I drive out to the east side to meet up with some folks and fellow DJs for a night of heavy tuneage... the Kyuss/Sabbath worship of the 3 SG'ed Electric Lucifer, the doomy riffage of Gates of Slumber (Aesop's summary here is apt), who my friends were there to see and didn't disappoint.

I was there mostly for headliners Hammers of Misfortune, which I stumbled across on the Internets and fell in love with because despite not being super big into the more progtastic strains of metal, I dig their sound and songwriting, which kind of reminds me of some unexplainable convergence of X and something 70's and British, must be the male/female vocals and the keyboards, I'm not sure. Would have loved to hear this song but it was still a solid set, even if the frontman's non-singing stage presence reminded me of hardcore shows from my teenage years.

(photo courtesy of this guy on twitter)
The sound for all seemed bigger than the venue, which is what I like about Grog shows as a rule, that I can see bands that play big festivals a few feet away on a small stage and get too shy to say hello (what does one say to Carrie Brownstein when she's standing right behind you anyway?)...
 
There were maybe 15-20 people there including members of the openers, which made me feel kind of bad for the bands involved, and descriptions heard from the stage and from the crowd involved metaphors like cancer ward, sleeping, dead, empty, due to the moments of absolute silence between sets when the jukebox wasn't getting fed with the Stooges and Minor Threat.

Some of us like yours truly are introverted souls who prefer to do the standing-still than get all crazy. No wonder less folks come through here anymore, since it seems there's a better draw for Hot Topic-core than heshery for grownups. Due to my lack of "cred" I've gotten some flack in the past for not "supporting the scene" (as in, not getting drunk while watching your lousylocal band), but none of those people were in attendance even with an unbelievably low  $7 cover. At the end of the night me and a couple black metallers were kind of standing there in disbelief over at the merch table wondering how we just watched three solid bands and no one was there, so we attempted to compensate by picking up some CDs and t-shirts and all but apologizing for the lack of Clevelandian rocking. It must suck to play the hell out of your songs every night to a handful of people in places that aren't Brooklyn.

Drove home with the newest record spinning in the car, got the crap scared out of me by some dude walking the dog in the middle of the street at 1 in the morning who yelled at me and I was unmotivated to argue, slept in an extra half hour and have been alternating mugs of coffee and chocolate to stay awake today...

When it's all worn out, I'd rather go without...

I don't know if it was something I did or something I said except for maybe blurting out in a conversation among many of us that I wasn't sure I felt at this point like I was wanting to be tied down to anyone currently in my world, that I'm still trying to sort through all the feelings of prior losses, but since then the communication has lapsed completely, and in one way maybe it's a relief, and in another I wonder how many other things I inevitably implode with verbiage, but then I wasn't sure what to feel if anything, there were so many unsureties all the way around, attempting to figure out how to conform to norms and relationals that make me skittish by default. Not so much a breakup or a bang but a whimper and I still say this is better.

knowledge of motion but not of stillness...

sometimes the structure and the daily grind is welcome, with the familiar caffeine in the mug of shame, the way the hours slip away, there are changes afoot, closed doors and whispers, and who knows what that would be, try not to think about it too much, try not to aspire, because conversations with certain people are awkward due to the imbalance and the mutual lack of camaraderie.

And I find it harder to make small talk, I get bored with hearing people talk about what's on TV or what they ate for dinner yesterday. I don't even know what to say because whatever will come out of my mouth will come out more dismissive than I mean it to. There's nothing wrong with those things, it's just not something that gets my brain moving.

Technocracy's soullessness evidences itself in the little things too hard to articulate. The blissful ignorance, the mistaking the means for the ends, the continual talking past each other, the veiled condescension and disdain that evaporates off my lips without meaning for it to.

So easy to change the channel, change the directional flow of the conversation when it gets too pithy and goes beyond song lyric bumper sticker Facebook meme sloganeering. I find irony when those who think I'm a little wacky for believing in some God up there somewhere seem to put an awful lot of faith in certain things like the American political process in relation to certain political parties, certain leaders as infallible as the popes they might deride who somehow can do no wrong despite the blood crying out from the ground. We've all got our little religions, involving deities our venerations of saints, our arcane rituals, our stimulants and opiates. It's just as matter of which kind, which ones give life and which ones slowly destroy.

o world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

Thinking of The Children

So the photo below has been making the rounds as far as saying "oh isn't that sweet and how could anyone thing bad of him" because Kundera-esque kitsch knows no bounds on both sides, and visuals are powerful mediums. The camera only shows one angle, one dimension and any picture can be worth a thousand words of propaganda. Besides, part of Politics 101 is kissing babies and posing with kids. Who the hell are we kidding?
 

 let's take a look at the rest of the world, shall we? Here's Enver Hoxha, Der Fuhrer, Lenin, Richard Nixon, Josef Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Everybody's Not-Favorite Pope, Mr. KGB, and Robert Mugabe. Oh it's so sweet. Who would ever think that any of these people did anything that wasn't nice and didn't Care A Lot?

and of course this:

It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it, right Chuck?...

you used to be like my twin

Sometimes it's easier not to see and remember, my arms and words were sincere but I wonder how much yours were, or if you even know. I wish I knew that there was some truth there. I'm trying to live out this forgiveness thing but the helplessness, the sadness, the anger at the wrongness all around, I wish my attitude was more pure, I wish I couldn't feel all those emotions rising back up again. I keep on moving on, I don't know how to look back, I wonder if my forgiveness is pure, I'd be willing to begin again, but I crave truth and I find none.

find my nest of salt, everything's my fault

So I wonder if my love is conditional when the heart is full of more exasperation than forgiveness and even if God is love perfected there was a whole lot of destruction bound up in that too that I just can't wrap my head around. Sorry Francis of Assisi, it's damn hard to sow love in the mire of hatred without coming way too close to being sucked in.

We all could play the blame game, the primary competition in the Suffering Olympics. Who hasn't felt burned, who hasn't borne the brunt of someone else's casual cruelty. Even the worst among us still has feelings, but those feelings are no absolution.

I apologize for what I said, not expecting acceptance or reconciliation or even anything resembling love. To continue to exist there needs to be some degree of truth and mutual owning up, which doesn't always happen. I crave resolution but that can only come when both entities are willing to own up. I do the best I can, but if you're not moving, we can't meet halfway.