The embers of our torch have not gone out...

I’ve been gone from here for too long, well gone too long without posting anything of value I mean. I should warn you that the bulk of this is going to be very inflammatory, very objectionable, ridden with profanity and will be almost novel length in its scope. That being said, if you’re still reading, thank you.

                I have wasted so much time and energy griping about so much useless drivel, so much inconsequential subject matter than I almost want to kick my own ass. It has dawned on me recently just how needlessly arrogant and pretentious we have become as a culture and society. We are the pinnacle of human malfeasance and we don’t even know it. We sully everything we touch, we destroy everything we create, we tarnish and ruin everything that we see to be beautiful, and we do it all without ever pausing to consider that maybe, just maybe, our own egos have gone a bit too far. It never dawns on us that we could possibly be in error or may have made a mistake. We as “Americans” (god I hate that term), have become a nation of people that believe we are the paragon of intelligence, enlightenment and sophistication in the world. It’s drilled into our children, bandied about on TV in the rhetoric and spin you hear from the anchors on the news, and pontificated as fervently as any bible borne sermon by every talking head in “power” that we, our country, our government, our people are the pinnacle of human social engineering and everything that the rest of the world aspires to be. Newsflash: We’re not.

                I’m 26 years old, I’m well read, I take advice, and I know well enough to keep my nose clean and pick my words carefully. What follows is a direct assault, albeit a verbal one, directed at my peers for their ineptitude and complacency with the status quo despite their penchant to complain. You’re weak, naïve children. You have no idea who you are as individuals, having never had to develop an identity of your own that wasn’t dictated by authority or a chosen emulation of a media darling. You don’t understand how your government works, you can’t comprehend the real merit of issues you hear about, and for most of you, and your reading comprehension is akin to that of a third grader. How the majority of you graduated high school is testament to lenient grading and social engineering. In addition to your intellectual deficiencies I also find it alarming with how self-important you are. You are not a special and unique snowflake, you don’t matter, you’re insignificant, you matter about as much as a mound of fly dung, yet you assail the world at large with youtube videos, twitter updates, mass text messages, and a seemingly endless amount of photos of something that matters only to you. You have little to offer the social conversation or commentary and on the whole you’re a detriment to the future of the planet. You prefer to watch the Jersey Shore of comment on basketball trades as though somehow it really had some vital impact on the world. Sorry to be the one to tell you, but it doesn’t. It’s all meaningless, just like you. You are the living, breathing, procreating product of years conditioning, until you become exactly what those in power have always wanted, easily malleable cattle to be herded and marched where and when they choose.

                For most of you, I imagine that thought is painful, which is why you busy yourself with thousands of channels of mind killing television, yoga, fad diets, calorie counting, trendy martial arts, commentary about how much you hate the latest pop star shat out by your corporate masters, and the flow of meaningless thoughts that you espouse en masse. All of these things hurt your fragile little mind so much less than actually having to use the ten pounds of pulsing grey matter that has been wasted between your ears. So to those of you, I say cling to your petty pursuits, they will comfort you when your corporate masters have taken everything of value you had to take and left you with nothing more than an empty, broken existence that is comprised of little more than bumper sticker slogans and tabloid headlines about which trick baby of Paris Hilton’s is up for a spot on American Idol this week. You have willingly let yourselves become blind to the truth that every civil liberty and privilege that you espouse as being evidence for your prescribed superiority, is being systematically taken from you.

                We exist at a point in human history where we have the means to share information at a rate never before available to our ancestors and yet we squander it with useless pursuits of popularity and idle time wasting. We could use these tools for so much more than we do but instead it’s a sea of uselessness and advertising. Games that keep your docile or take your money for intangible achievements that do little more than earn you the ire or envy of people just as vapid and brain numbed as you are. Well done, you just beat a five year old with Down syndrome and blunt force head trauma at chess, do you feel like a big man?

                Our government has neutered the very basis of everything that we were brought up to believe made us special, and we let them do it. We traded away our rights one at a time for the promise of safety that never materialized. Our internet is about to be censored because the corporate machine has grown weary of not getting Bieber record sales to five billion in a one week time frame so now they limit our access to the last bastion of open speech and information.

                Now all of that having been said, shared, stated, and espoused, I’d like to take a minute to get very serious. We stand on the precipice of something terrible. The unthinkable is about to happen in here in the US, this place we call the land of the free and the home of the brave. Our government, of their own accord and without input or insight from the people they’re sworn to server, has taken it upon themselves to propose a radical new law, an almost unfathomable violation of one of the most basic tenets of “American Life”. We are no longer free citizens, we are to be censored in our information, and imprisoned for our dissidence. Since WWII it has been touted as bedrock of our political and ideological system that we are free to do as we please, to live as we choose, to pursue and realize our destinies as we see fit. Now that right, that promise, that dream is being taken from us and it’s being done, not with force, but with legislation. This is the first step toward martial law. The first stone laid as the foundation at what will eventually be the end of our great country. Within the next few years the fear mongering of far too many corrupt, stingy and easily manipulated politicians will usher in a draconian state that will bear a striking resemblance to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR. Our freedoms, our liberties are being taken from us, and we’re letting it happen. Every day that goes by, Congress enacts some new piece of legislation that seeks to undermine or curtail our activities just a bit more finely. The time to act is now, and sadly there is precious little time at all to get anything done.

                We stand on the threshold of collapse. Our economy is bankrupt, our enemies supply us with all of our material goods, our allies are weaker than we are as a result of decades of systematically weakening them to position us as the dominant power in the world, and even the people of this country lack the fortitude and intelligence to really change very much. Politics has become a numbers game where whoever can spend the most money will invariably become the new poster child of the regime. Congress makes all the rules, the president does his best to curtail their activities while exercising his own agenda, and the Supreme Court seems to be sitting on the sidelines, entrenched with meaningless cases. Our system is broken, and sadly it’s not broken in the sense that nothing works, it works quite nicely if Fascism is what you choose to live in. If you idealize Mussolini’s Italy then this country is going to become not just your cup of tea, but a veritable Valhalla. If we do nothing to act, if there is no show of force by the people of this country, if we cannot rise up and speak with one voice, united, strong, and unwavering and declare that the most basic principle of this country is a government “Of the people, for the people, and by the people” we will wake one day very soon, within the next five years, and find our personal freedoms worth less than the aging parchment they’re printed on, and our children will be indoctrinated into a world and a belief system that furthers this horrible reality.

                Movements like the Occupy and Anonymous, show that there are dissidents, but sadly both of these groups can and will most likely be branded terrorists under the new legislation passing through Congress. The Bill of Rights will be rendered moot, and the guarantees it offers will be stripped away from us completely until we have only the option of adhering to the wishes of the government. George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, he believed that Stalin’s USSR would prevail. George Lucas released THX-1138 in 1971, a grim look at a future devoid of emotion, where people didn’t think, but remain contented and mind numbed by propaganda, medication, and complacency. Christian Bale played a Cleric in 2002’s Equilibrium, and the film portrayed a future where you could be shot on sight for having or feeling an emotion. And in the mid 1980’s Alan Moore produced a comic call V for Vendetta that dealt extensively with Fascism versus Anarchy and the crippling of a regime that used the truncheon as its primary means of communication with the populace. While these examples might seem like flights of fancy or simply great works of literature and fiction, the sad and startling truth that we need to recognize is that we’re barreling headlong into making these universes, these fictional fear states of martial law and violent oppression into not just a reality, but our reality. We are choosing this people, we are sitting silently and letting our government condemn us to a dark new era. An era where thought and expression are censored, where free speech is a thing of the past, where fear is the currency and the standard, where love and emotion on any genuine level are simply whispers and storybook concepts. A world where questioning authority, asking for more, working for something better, being an asset, trying to contribute or voice dissent is punishable in one of the harshest ways fathomable, and there is no second chance, no appeal or redemption. A world where we seek only to remain out of the government’s all Seeing Eye and instead of living for fulfillment we live just enough to remain alive. We are allowing this to happen because in the past ten years we have been made into small, cowardly, weak willed, woefully ignorant cattle. We march numbly and silently to the slaughter, never daring to break loose from the confines of the tract we’re in.

                If our forefathers, the men and women that fought and died to establish this country, the brave souls that fought again to protect it, the countless sons and daughters that battled tooth and nail to unify it, the innumerable troops that suffered flying bullets and bombs while praying ceaselessly within trenches, the righteous generation that took up arms to knock down two tyrants and keep our homeland safe, if they could see what this country has become, the harsh unrecognizable ugliness of our political system and men and women that are part of it, if they could see with their own eyes, the horror that their sacrifices made way for, I’ve no doubt that the founding fathers would lay down arms and remain British. The soldiers of 1812 would march gladly with white flags in hand. The Union armies would simply cease firing and welcome the Confederates to their own mandates. The brave soldiers of WWI would choose to remain idle instead of knock down an empire on the brink of world domination. And if my grandfather could have foreseen that this country that he fought so hard to protect would eventually morph into this beast of reprehensible rhetoric and ideology, I can only assume that he and others from his generation, would welcome Hitler with open arms and wide smiles.

                Genghis Khan, Caesar, Nero, Napoleon Bonaparte, King George III, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler were some of the most detested, despised, and vile men of their day. The victimized, subjugated, enslaved, massacred, and perpetrated some of the most insidious genocides of our history, but the one thing that separates all of these men from our own talking head in D.C. is that these unnatural men were single minded and honest about their intentions. They may have offered grand propaganda again Jews, political dissidents, or foreign peoples, but they didn’t hide the ugliness of their actions, they embraced them and used them as a cornerstone for the furthering of their ideology. Our men and women in the designer suits, collecting six figure checks from businesses that want just a few more options and a bit more time to oppress and victimize the fine people of this country, they believe that their word is law, they are accountable to no one. In ancient Rome when an emperor failed to protect his people, he was beheaded, murdered, or lynched. In every other society, whenever a leader failed in his task, he was publicly killed to send a message that failure has consequences. Now we simply cease electing these stuff shirts in favor of more virile candidates that use charm and blatant lies to beguile and charm our hearts and minds to pledge allegiance to them. They’re ineffective, they’re useless, and they offer no more benefit to us, the people, than any foreign dictator would.

                The power is ours, the time is ours, the choice is ours. We can fight, we can crusade and demand that stars and stripes that so many of our ancestors, our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even our children fought and died for mean something again. That the promises made and written down some two hundred years ago are not just the empty promises of a generation long since dead, but are in fact the most paramount declarations of certainty and decency that can be made. It is up to us to require more of our leaders to organize public dissension of the highest order, to echo the call for a higher standard of behavior, conduct, and representation from the people that have the privilege to hold office in this country. If you’re a senator, a member of the House, on some civil or municipal board of directors, you have a duty and a moral obligation if not a legal one, to bear in mind and always work to represent the wants, needs and wishes of the people that chose to let you occupy that office. Your failure in this duty is not just a loss of power, but a wide reaching and far spanning loss of faith in the system, the office, and the idea. Democracy didn’t fail, the people did. We let fear infect us like a cancer and we still allow it to influence and affect every choice, every piece of legislation, every single facet of our lives, and we do it without even being peripherally aware that we are letting it happen.

                The world is changing, rapidly and energetically and we are standing still. We’re too mired in our Tweets, our Facebook posts, and who is getting voted off of the latest trendy reality show. We defend the practice of devoting our attention to these pursuits with token rationalization and little real consideration to just how indoctrinated we really are. Even those of us who claim, “Well I read”, consider the content of what time is spent reading anything of value. It’s all fluff. Twilight drivel, Sarah Palin’s thought (I know it’s bad grammar but let’s be honest if she has more than one thought at a time her head will explode), or some niche book that somehow lends credit or credence to the claim that we’re individuals and don’t buy into the establishment. It’s all tripe and it amounts to nothing of any real measure of importance. Uselessness of the highest order and we sit on the sidelines with our petty reasoning, trying to construct a reality where the worst case scenario isn’t at hand.

                Our government has been the world’s police, from our point of view, a beacon of freedom and democracy to the dark corners of the world. But to the rest of the world, we’re meddlers, inserting ourselves into affairs that have nothing to do with us. We’re not making the world safe for democracy, we’re using force, subversion and espionage to exercise our agenda and make the world safe for our own agenda to come to fruition. We’re no different than Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Communist China. The difference is, we have country music to back up our claims of superiority and entitlement. The majority of country music focuses on this country being the last safe haven of people who hate oppression and paint the rest of the world as bleak by comparison. Alan Jackson, Keith Urban, Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, all of them have authored some abhorrent song meant to illustrate how the air in this country makes you healthy, food is plentiful and cheap, housing is readily available and affordable, and how our government is setting an example for the rest of the world. Sad truth is that we have innumerable homeless, many of the recent additions have been relegated to their fates by a failed system of corrupt real estate with no regulation, a military affairs board that gives little acknowledgement to those that have paid the cost for the ideological freedom so many of us are indoctrinated to believe we still have, and the majority of our farmers and producers are paid not to grow crops in order to keep prices at an acceptable level.

                It’s madness and yet it happens every day. We can stop it, if we care enough, but we have to fix the schism within us, we have to unite over something more profound than television and films, we have to recapture the essence of our idealism, the very basis of the ideological rhetoric that our forebears marched triumphantly onto the shores of Normandy to protect, the very basic principles that so many of our founding fathers spilled blood to establish. We need to unite in a single voice, to realize that the world is in a spiral and only if we band together and fight the current can we reverse the flow and make something great. I only pray we figure out what is going on, and a chorus of voices chant in perfect harmony that we deserve better, we demand better, and we will fight to achieve better. The essence of the American spirit is something that is not dead, but rather stifled. We are the country that landed on the moon, won two world wars, threw off the chains of oppression from our colonial era masters,  and served as trailblazers for the internet, computers, iPods, refrigerators, color television, the telephone, the cell phone, and even the blues that served as the basis for rock and roll. This country was great once, we were a leader, we innovated, inspired, and cultivated greatness. We nurtured and supported each other and life was made better by our collective vision of a better tomorrow, now we’re scattered, divided, and at odds with the basic principles that only two or three generations ago were staples of dinner table discussions and championed in the halls of foreign lands as the bar by which all other countries aspired to meet. We need to take the baton back, to find our course and demand better than we have been given, require more of the people that are in a position to lead us, and cease the petty pursuits of idly passing time and get back to doing something worthwhile.

The closing hours...

So as the final hours of the year tick by, most everyone else is looking forward to the changing of the calendar with rapt anticipation and anxiousness befitting a four year old hopped up on sugar and soda the night before Christmas. It’s the same thing every year, everyone wants to wash away the misery and disappointment of the passing year and welcome with open arms the coming one, believing that it will finally be the year that they get the job they want, or the house they’ve been aiming for, or they’ll finally get the girlfriend or boyfriend they’ve been after, or even just that they’ll lose weight and get in shape. No matter the meaningless resolution, people still share how excited they are to welcome the new year and do away with the old one, with only a few showing thanks or appreciation for the trials they faced in the passing one.

For me, the year started with bleary eyed drunkenness and being carried to bed by Dean. Those days are done, and in some ways I’m sorry to see them go, in other ways I’m not even batting an eye that they’ve become a thing of the past. 2011 brought many challenges for me, and I managed to overcome and conquer each of them with style, grace, and a smidgen of dignity. I began the year desperately looking for another job, pining away to find some other means of employment and hoping against hope to find something, anything that was better, even marginally, than the employment I found at HP. That came in April. April was a big month for me, I got my own place, found the first job I’ve ever really loved, and I managed to do it all through my own grit and determination.

June cast a bit of a pallor on the year as the longest and most sordid chapter of my life came to an end, and while the pain and agony I endured from the fallout of that was something I thought would end me, I managed to survive and persevere into the next phase. I found some semblance of sanity from the ashes and I’m beginning to accept that despite my claims at being the embodiment of evil and carnal trickery in the universe, I’m actually a bit more decent than I would have other believe. Sadly the summer didn’t end its bad new and disappoint there but dropped a bomb on me that I’m still sorting through the results of. Dean has long been a living id for me, allowing me to live vicariously through his lack of tact and overall brashness, it was comforting to know that someone, anyone, existed in the world that hadn’t been sullied or brainwashed into behaving as expected just for the sake of doing it. But he found love and sadly, as happy as I am for him, with that new dynamic came a passing to ours. I’ve spoken to him only a handful of times since July and seen him twice. I guess even the longest running friendships run their course eventually. The most startling thing for me is that for the first time in about twelve years, I don’t have someone I can call my best friend. Kind of scary to know that you don’t have someone you can rely on implicitly.

That aside, the year was a big one. I found my dream job, I finally struck out on my own, and despite the odds of the universe seeming to conspire against me en masse, I managed to establish what so far has been a welcome change in romantic dynamics. So things are moving in the right direction, I’ve found my spiral as it were. I had a year of stress, headache, heartache, chaos, loss, longing, and disappointment but like the weary unwavering soldier I am, I carried on and I arrive at my current point. I’m not quite happy, but I’m getting there. Life is only getting better. I’m reminded of a toast I made with Eddie a couple of years back, I think over drinks at a Dave & Busters of all places, a midnight showing of some random movie, Eddie proposed that we toast to “Life only getting better” and at the time, in the back of my mind I reasoned that if I could just manage the insanity that was my day to day, and keep it consistent, I’d be content, but here I am, sometime later, and I find that my life has only gotten better, and remains on the uptick. Not to say that it isn’t without it’s setbacks and problems, but for the most part, I’m more prepared, less jaded, and more resilient, I’m wiser without being bitter.

I look forward to the new year, not because I want to deny the trials of the ending one, or even any of the ones that came before it, we are the culmination of the experiences we survive, and the end result of the challenges we overcome, and there is something beautifully noble in that, something admirable about admitting that we’re far from perfect but all the same we’re still working to find something close to it, and we’re willing to stumble, to fall and eat shit, to suffer and toil, to risk failure, just to find something more, to make what we have better. We are only as strong as we allow ourselves to be, and we owe it to ourselves to make every year, not just the new ones, the best we possibly can, to continue to strive to achieve more and make every day count. So it is with that thought in mind I propose a toast, “To life only getting better, every day, in every way. May we find happiness in uncommon places and be surprised at every turn by none other than ourselves and those we hold dear, and may life remain interesting, challenging, and fulfilling. To all of you my friends: love, laugh, enjoy life, and work at making each day, not just each year, better than the one that came before it.” Cheers.

The cost of decency...

There is something fundamentally obscene about the lengths we're willing to go to protect those we hold in the highest regard. Eventually all human dynamics with absolute investment break down because we have become a society, a culture, a people that are incapable of trusting one another completely. Those of us that can trust, that can love, that can fight to overcome the obstacles we place in our own way to protect us from the maelstrom of interaction, we are invariably spit on, taken advantage of, and victimized, time and again by those that ask for more without ever being full. The stars that burn brightest are most often drained beyond salvation by the incessant vacuum of more selfish people. The girl that seeks solace and understanding but shies and runs away from connection or investment because of the complications it causes in her life with a boyfriend that evidently doesn’t bridge the gap completely, despite him probably being a perfectly wonderful man otherwise. A parent that requests, demands, manipulates and orchestrates the feelings and situations of others to get what they want and then stare stupefied at the sky, bewildered and lost by the idea that they might somehow actually be told “no”. The woman that uses, abuses, consumes, and obliterates everything good in another, and still seeks to be loved and adored despite the abhorrent behavior.

            It’s all so much excess, so much extraneous emotion and conviction, expelled for no reason other than the want to be decent, to be altruistic, to offer something more than what others have seen fit to make available. Ghandi is often quoted as saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world” yet those that actually make the effort, the ones that take up figurative arms and go to battle the injustices and closed mindedness of a world too lost in itself and unwilling to seek behavior, are the ones that beaten into submission and end up becoming the biggest detractors, the biggest naysayers, the most fervent decriers of any measure of human decency existing in the world. We are made and conditioned into the cynics we become. We offer an unwavering beacon of light amid the torrential storm, a safe harbor of understanding and compassion and for all the effort to keep out the winds, to remain grounded and unwavering in the face of that chaos, we are battered until the deluge comes flooding in and destroys all that has been built. The irony is that when we succumb and become something angry, dark, tormented, hollow, and unpleasant we’re told that we’re in the wrong. There is no safe haven, no salvation, no redemption, nothing to offer anyone, as we’re all doomed, and this is the machine that we built to accomplish this goal. We persecute those that would seek to make this place better because they keep us from the distractions that keep us so well occupied and ignorant. Ignorance has gone from being a vice to the ultimate virtue and the idea of anything else is seen to be the obscenity. 

So much excess...

The weather turns melancholy and I find my mood seems to be reflection of that. For the first time in a long time I find myself fighting the chill and the bitter sting of the encroaching cold, and I welcome it. There’s something rejuvenating about finding my footing on a path I’ve traversed alone before. I’ve trekked this wood, as it were, and I know the way through the forest. But there’s something altogether different about the journey this time around. I’m here by absolute choice, I’m washing clean the sins, draining all the poison and the venom left in my veins. I’m bleeding out with a purpose.

I loved, I loved fully, I loved deeply, and I loved with every ounce of my being. I have defended, I have purged, I have fought, I have toiled, and I have expounded at length but it means nothing in the end because it was just an experience. A situation I put myself in, and I sowed the seeds of those consequences. So much effort, so much energy, and all of it boiled down to an endeavor that was never clearly defined. In the end, I was there to be miserable because happiness is the only thing I’m afraid of. The idea of living for myself, of putting myself ahead of and beyond the need or expectation of so many others, of really breaking the bonds of servitude that shackle me to so much useless misery, so much endless excess…I would go to ends of the earth for her, but I didn’t want her, I just wanted the misery; more an addiction that anything else.

I’ve espoused poetry that would melt the hearts of so many others, I’ve dedicated sonnets and declarations too beautiful to capture on paper, and all for one so undeserving, one so selfish and self-righteous, the bane of my existence is perhaps my own creation. But the purge must be done, the draining of the abscess has to commence if I am to move on. The sky cries with me, washing away the sin of the world so something new can begin to thrive.

I was so lost in her, so dedicated. And it’s all ground that’s been covered before, covered en masse and at length, and while you guys may not like it, fuck off, I need to admit these things to myself. I have to face these demons and exorcise the best way I know how, so like it or not, she still gets some mention and page space. I lost myself, I gave the best of myself to someone with so little to offer, only unhappiness and misery. She was the answer to everything I have indoctrinated myself to believe I deserved. The shortcomings, the lack of commitment of emotion, so little to really offer, and yet I was the one that was left believing I didn’t measure up. I’ve endured so many unspeakable things, survived so much ugliness, too much suffering, and I learned, only through the grace of someone with patience that rivals my own, that I do deserve better, I am not the best, but I am solid and stronger of character than most anyone else.

I claim to be an ass, to be the terrible thing that brings sadness and despair, because it is all I see, but in truth I shoulder so much of that for so many others I’m left drowning in it. If I am ever to find myself, to get back to the person that only a select and privileged few have managed to know I can be, I have to open this wound and let bleed all of the terrible things locked within. She was a vicious, manipulative, selfish cunt that sought to have all of my affections, all of my energy and effort, but refused to offer anything in return. I took crumbs and scraps, devouring them like a rabid dog. I’ve had so many friends, so many people, all of them trying their hardest to get me to see the truth, to recognize the things that I had blinded myself to see, and I’ll be honest, I still can’t see myself the way they do, but I do see enough to know that I deserve better than I was given.

I was sullied. A tainted heart crying out for salvation and redemption, and despite myself I actually tried in earnest to sabotage myself and keep myself from being happy, from being given or shown better. Another bad choice, in an almost endless list of them, but I have to admit it. For all the credit I’m given, for all the guidance and advice I’m capable of offering so many others, for all the ability I have to “fix” everyone else, I’m incredibly broken. My depth, my passion, and my intellect have all been dulled in an effort to fit in, to conform and adapt. I’ve traded so much of myself away for so many shallow and hollow victories, and when I ran out of things to give, I shut off.

Now I’m staring at something wonderful, I’m flying through the air with no net and I’ve leapt over the side of the precipice into the abyss of madness and whatever else is within the black and that reckless abandon was done to further my sense of misery and increase the burden of chaos I shoulder, but instead I’m not falling toward uncertainty and terminal velocity, I’m gliding on the wings of angels toward soft landing and warm arms. As daunting as the idea and concept or notion of vulnerability is, given how badly damaged and broken I am as a person and how god awfully shattered I still am emotionally, it’s something I have to do. To know what it is to feel anything, to feel connected, to matter to someone else, even if I can’t muster the courage to matter to myself. There times and situations that test the mettle and resolve of us all, for most it’s death or loss that determines what we do when the pressure’s on. For me it’s an endless litany of things that seem to never abate or pause. Constantly tempered in this fire, and the irony is, I once burned white hot and I thrived there in the flames, but I actively moved myself from the heat of the flames to become someone I didn’t want to be, to let loose of so much energy and accept an idea who I needed to be to make someone else happy. Now I’m blinded by the passion that so many others have, and I want it so badly. I want to be back in the dead center of the flames, to glow once more with white hot intensity and fervor.

I’ve pontificated on resolve, gamut, plans, revelations, and declarations, but in the end it’s all just words if there’s no dedication to the idea. I need my integrity back. I’m not the doomed soul I think I am. I brood, I carry a darkness that few can understand, and I do carry the weight of not just the world on my shoulders but in some cases a grander macrocosm of things that go unseen even by eyes until they’re dangling inches from my nose. This is who I am. This is who I have always been. The self-professed martyr, the self-imposed sacrifice to attaining something better, that is who I have chosen to be. I once believed that I could never hope for more, to attain something greater or to even begin to fathom the idea of thriving in something less severe and occluded. But I have come to understand that not only is this no way to live, but it’s a disservice to those that would actively seek to love, to those that would choose to share some part of themselves with me. It isolates and insulated far too well, and leaves me an untainted bastion of integrity that is endlessly tormented by the ghosts of my own psyche, refusing to let go or relinquish the control it has. I am a terrible mess of complexities and chaos, but there is beauty in the wreckage and a sense of potential in the smoldering ruin.

Like the phoenix born anew, the ashes are not permanent. This death is not final. I am the son of a man that suffered so much injustice medically, and yet still he draws breath on this earth. I am the product of a broken home held together with little more shoe string and tape. I am the end result of my experiences, traumatic and debilitating as they may be, and yet still I stand, still I thrive, still I draw my own breath, filling my lungs with the coolness of rain soaked air, and I stare with my own eyes, filtered though they may be, at this screen and pen these words. My strength has not left me, I will not be bested by the terror I’ve ignored. I will endure, I will find my footing and achieve something I never have before…some semblance of true and unrivaled happiness. If the fates are willing, I will accomplish this task, like so many others that have been laid at my feet. 

I Am Made Of You...

In the beginning I was just a shadow
In the beginning I was alone
In the beginning I was blind, living in a world devoid of light
In the beginning there was only night


I was shattered, left in pieces
And I felt so cold inside
Then I called you from the darkness
Where I hide


I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you


In the beginning you were revelation
A river of salvation and now I believe


All I wanted, all I needed
Was someone to rescue me
I was drowning, I was dying
Now I'm free


I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you


Here I am now, I can stand now
Cause your love has made me strong
And forever you're the singer
I'm the song


I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you


I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you
I am made of you

Changing of the Winds...

The winds of fortune do not always blow the same. There are times when fortunes change, when the gods of chance and serendipity conspire in mysterious ways, putting events and actions in motion to bring about a conclusion, an outcome that at the outset seems less likely than one could possibly fathom. The scheme seems to be more than a long shot, it’s an outright impossibility. Like turning air into gold or network television moving away from reality shows as its bread and butter there seems only one possible outcome. Miraculously though, the timeline chugs along moving at a snail’s pace with no clear end in sight, then all at once the light shines blindingly bright, a beacon on the horizon that illuminates the entire sky, outshines the sun, and yet even with such intensity, such vibrancy and brilliance, you can’t help but look upon it. Beauty, true beauty beheld, not just fathomed or imagined, but gazed upon, seen with fresh eyes and openness, the soul welcoming the luminescence as the shadows recede from the forefront and do their best to hide, such a thing is at best a pipedream, to most anyway. But for a very lucky few, those committed to toil and suffer, to while away countless hours and endure untold burdens and still greet the dawn with more than a token smile, the ones to whom even given the most negative and terrible circumstances, something within them stirs, something echoes and tingles, accepting and embracing that light, that brilliance, and all at once the universe finds harmony, the microcosm of their life settles into a careful clockwork of meticulous perfection and there is no fear, only the inverse.

Such a thing is rare, occurring less than one time out of however many stars there are in the sky and yet it does happen. For most it’s a dream, the hazy fog giving away only the slightest hints of the illusion, yet for those instances the lie is clung to so tenaciously that for most they demand it to be real. They convince themselves that if they believe it hard enough they can make it fact, they can actually alter reality and force their way into making something from nothing. For others they get the real thing and they can’t see past the microcosms of their own agendas to appreciate or recognize the opportunity that’s staring them in the face. It’s sad but it’s true. Most of us are too consumed by our own agendas to really acknowledge or recognize even the smallest hint of good fortune when it’s presented. Then there is a third group, those that disbelieve such a thing can happen, they approach it with trepidation and denial, almost willing the winds to change once more. So with so many options, so much ignorance and disconnection, how can anyone ever really accept and acknowledge the good fortune they’re faced with? Is it luck? Is it fate? Is it skill or observance? I can’t say and I won’t posit because I think it’s such a rare and perfect storm of circumstances and events that for each outcome the circumstances are so far different, but I will say this, when it does happen and the opportunity is seized...even the greatest poets lost their words, the most beautiful voices lose their sound, the most powerful law ceases to matter, and in that instant and forever after there is nothing greater, nothing more profound or complete than the passion that erupts and burns with more intensity than a million stars and nothing, not time, not gravity, loss or longing, will ever extinguish it.

The poet's last sonnet of depth and beauty...

Much has been made of my passion my emotional strength and ability but in the end I think it’s really nothing more than a load of bullshit that I told myself and allowed so many others to rattle off because it stroked my ego. Pride is my sin of choice, and while overt praise might be something that makes me uncomfortable, I have no issue or apprehension when it comes to recognizing or acknowledging other attributes. So it with that said that I find myself in a familiar but all but forgotten spot.
I’ve been here before, I walked these halls, I’ve trekked these roads and gone this route and I’d all but forgotten it. It seems that much like the lyrics, “I’ve come round, full circle”. She pulled me from the precipice once upon a time, or perhaps I just pulled myself from the brink of descent in order to indulge in what I thought would be little more than a brief jaunt of carnal satisfaction, but somewhere in the deeper recesses I knew it couldn’t work. I smothered myself in her, tried to ignore and run from the chasm of emptiness. I wanted to be gone from it, but I didn’t want it for me, I wanted it for her. In her I saw an opportunity to be happy, but I really just diluted myself into believing that’s what it was.
Now I’m back, staring into the endlessly dark abyss and watching as my toes creep over the edge, waiting for that subtle wind, the soft flap of a butterfly’s wing, or just the right words, before I jump over the edge and spiral headlong into that gap, no longer diluting myself with ideas of higher grandeur or the illusion that I can attain something more. I am alone, set adrift in a society that I never fit into. My best friend has turned his back on me to pursue his own romantic pursuits and being too tired of listening to me lament the loss I suffered, opting to decry, insult, impugn, belittle, and offer one derogatory comment after another as to how I let her victimize me, how I allowed myself to be emotionally raped time and again, how I have no right to call myself a man, how I need to move on and forget the “stupid hooker”. I need no reminder or assistance in feeling self-loathing or anger. I’ve got those emotions in spades.
But I am alone. I have no one close to talk to, no soul to share with, no sympathetic essence to whisper to. My best friend has left me, the love of my life has gone away, the once hallowed voices within this last bastion of sanity have long since gone quiet and departed. I gave up so much for her, and it seems now I’m left with nothing. I’d say it’s ironic but it was bound to happen. So once again, I’m on the edge, the dirt squishing between my toes, the sand rough against the soles of my feet, the soft breeze carrying a million sordid and painful memories that never seem to cease their assault on my threadbare psyche, the violent sun beating down relentlessly on my burnt and bruised skin, my eyes hollow and broken a fitting metaphor for the once vibrant organ that beat within my now cavernous chest, and despite it all, a knowing smile graces my lips. A knowing smile that I choose this, I choose to be here. I choose to dwell in this place because it’s better than the alternative, it’s a more fitting and quietly beautiful place than the horrors that wait me in the other place, in the land where I can still smell her in the air, I can taste her on my lips, I can still feel her in my arms, under my fingertips. The place where I have the highest peaks of happiness and fulfillment, beyond anything I ever dared dream. She swore, time again, there was another out there, someone more deserving, someone more worthy. I didn’t believe it then, I don’t believe it now.
This world is full of ugly people, and I can’t stand it anymore. I’m immersed in a society of broken people miring in their own misery instead of trying to mend their damage or better their station, a world where being decent and offering kindness is seen to be something extraordinary and noteworthy instead of common and unremarkable because of the prevalence of it, an existence where even the most pure and unconditional love offered to someone else is spit back time and again with little more than a token show of emotion and gratitude and the platitude that someone else will be more deserving and able to return it in kind instead of just accepting it for what it is. This world is sick, and it’s trying to infect me, to break me, to ruin me. I devoted all of myself to an ideal, to a belief, to a person…and in return I was told I wasn’t good enough, that my compassion for my parents was a weakness, that my kindness or my ability to handle the chaos of the world was a detriment, that my eyes being open was some kind of flaw…that my love was wrong.
I dealt with it as a consequence of the dynamic I put myself in. I suffered through it because faith and hope allowed me to hold out for more, and in the end I had nothing but four wasted years of heartache and disappointment and a “girlfriend” that would rather spend hours of time beating herself up instead of making the hard choices and doing what her heart had been screaming at her to do weeks before she stood at the alter and made her life a lie. But such is the past and I am powerless to influence the will of others or to alter what has already happened. I am, however, in complete control of the choice I now face, the chasm I’m teetering on, the abyss I’m looking so very deeply and intently into. If I have learned anything it is that this world is full of ugly, selfish, ignoble people, more consumed with furthering their own designs, with satisfying their own misguided agendas, than they are with adhering to any sense of decency, kindness, compassion or measure of appreciation for the acceptance and understanding they’re shown. This world, this place, is unworthy of me, undeserving of having what I offer, it is too selfish, too uncaring, too wretched to ever earn what I have to give.
And so, once again I’m on the jagged edge, looking over and past my toes into that dark black hole, the emptiness, baiting me, calling me, coaxing me with outstretched arms to enter the embrace of being numb, of being beyond the ugliness, of simply existing without reaction, of being freed from my passion, and I am wont to enter, to take a single step over the edge and shut it all down, to break the bonds of my own self servitude and find freedom. These shackles I wear do nothing to enlighten me, they keep me bound like a dog, waiting to be fed, to be acknowledged or noticed, to be loved. I was at this four years ago, spying that waiting hole and approaching with caution and trepidation but I walked the other way because I believed it led to something better…it didn’t.
Now I’m back and I’ve made my decision, no more passion, no more writing, no more caring, no more venting, no more caring…just the cold silent embrace of emptiness. I am alone. I gave all I had and so many took without giving back. So now I am taking for me. I will be above it all, beyond it all, unable to care or get involved, no longer moved by tears or entreaties, just cold and calculating, like many others. Down this road untold success awaits, unfathomable riches, immense wealth and advancement, all by playing the game that everyone else has been. I’ve reached the end of the board and I am no longer a pawn. I will seize my destiny and assert my will. I will make the descent and plunge into that gaping maw leaving behind pain and anger, impotence and rage, fear and doubt, loss and longing, and love. I will be free and untainted, no longer a slave to my desires. No systematic detachment or pithy rhetoric, just ceasing to care. No one else ever has, no reason I should either.