Perhaps the last dawn...

An old friend of mine once told me that the entire purpose of life came down to a simple maxim, “The pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain”. At the time, and even now, I find that very trite and basic; almost too simple to even be worthy of debate or consideration. Sadly though, for most that is what life is all about. It’s the rhetoric we use, the platitudes we share, and ideology we espouse. “Live in the now”, “Forget the past”, “Always move forward”, “Never lament lost friends”, and the idioms go on and on ad infinitum. All of these things are great as bumper sticker slogans and eye catching or comment inducing Facebook posts, but for genuine wisdom or even powerful imagery it’s just empty words. We’re introspective beings by nature, we’re designed to reflect, to learn and adapt, to cull worthwhile information every action and reaction and tailor future behavior and interactions to produce or influence beneficial results.

Now while one might argue that this would seem to support or lend credence to the idea of pursuing happiness above all else, it’s worth noting a desired result does not always mean aiming for happiness. Self-sacrifice is something of a myth in today’s world, with selfishness and single mindedness being promoted by pretty much every major informer of personal opinion. We’re conditioned to consume, to seek out newer, better, more luxurious comforts and accoutrement; brainwashed into believing that the only true measure of success is a big house, a flashy expensive car, and a sizable number of offspring to offer up in order to perpetuate ensure the survival of the hereditary genome. But this is how society would have us measure success today. In ages long gone, when intelligence was something to be aspired to, when the betterment of all mankind was the highest calling and most fulfilling reward one could hope to achieve, when public discourse allowed for worthwhile dissent and a meaningful and worthwhile exchange of ideas, success was measured by how big of a footprint one managed to leave on the world during their brief time here.

Humanity is on an uncertain course, a unspecified route into the future, and in my lifetime, brief as it’s been up to now, I have seen a dangerous a fundamentally flawed change in focus from the useful to the banal and mediocre. Television serves to keep people docile and easily influenced, with few people bothering to question the information disseminated to them and most identifying more with Reality TV stars instead of visionaries, of which we have hardly any left. There are no heroes left, at least in the United States.

When I was a kid, we were told that we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up; anything at all. An astronaut, a news anchor, a doctor, a lawyer, even president, it was all within reach if we wanted it. The truth though, is that for most of us we grow up expecting a reality that doesn’t exist. There are no more astronauts; our space program has been reduced to little more than a few billion dollar projects to do further research on things that vast majority of people find to be esoterically interesting. We’re not going to the moon, the first manned mission to Mars won’t be with NASA but from some private corporation that offers the lowest bid to get a willing crash test dummy meat sack to the rust colored orb. This is the legacy of those pioneers of yesteryear. News anchors serve as puppets for the major networks, delivering only the approved missives of their corporate masters and serving more as a mouthpiece of distraction to instill fear and compliance into a naïve populace. There’s no journalistic integrity anymore with sensationalism having been the most profitable standard for delivery of any information, everyone seeks to deliver gossip as fact and plays up the myriad of scenarios that might have resulted in a more catastrophic result. Doctors and lawyers are worthwhile professions but with a healthcare system that seeks to impose more bureaucracy and further complicate things like who pays for a bandage, the insurance company or the patient, there’s no nobility left in the profession. It’s a person in neon scrubs, giving lip service to a scared person on a gurney, offering token reassurances and the whole while everyone from the X-ray technician to the OR surgeon is really just hoping to avoid a malpractice suit and to allow the patient to live long enough to actually pay the bill. Lawyers have been vilified in popular culture by how many of them go on to serve as politicians and further debilitate an already bankrupted country. In popular media they’re more often seen as champions of justice and morality or portrayed as faceless cogs in a system that ignores them as individuals and just churns along like a torrential river. And no one reading this will ever be president. In order to serve in what was once the most hallowed office in the Western World, one has to be willing to be unscrupulous, allow their purchase by multiple corporations and special interest groups, have a thin allegiance to anything and everyone except the biggest check, and if the first four years of Obama’s term is any indication, a set of personal beliefs that can be easily influenced or changed to suit whatever the other side demands of you in order to get anything done.

The Lone Ranger is long dead, Superman was killed in the early ‘90’s and even though DC brought him back, that hallowed mythology has been forever shattered, and even the heroes we’re allowed to see on screen, television or theatre, serve only to make money instead of to inspire. Greed is humanity’s sin of choice and they make no apologies for it. Politicians that decry any form of socialism or equality as being against the basic principles of this country, either from a religious standpoint or from the “true intentions” of the Founding Fathers (if you actually buy into the Teabagger rhetoric), and an overly wealthy percentage of owners of this country and are unapologetic for their unabashed buying of public policy and still insist that they don’t have enough because someone else out there still has something they don’t. In kindergarten one of the most important things they impress upon us, outside of being able to color in the lines and count to ten, is to share. But the adult world tells us that if you’re decent and honorable, even just once putting someone else before yourself no matter the reason, you have committed career suicide and are doomed to remain in the same station in life with no hope or possibility of ever advancing. Greed is good it seems. The Christian right demands a return to more wholesome biblical values, well if that’s the case and that’s really what they mean, why don’t they start with demanding that the politicians they beseech to limit the public’s access to pornography and violence focus instead of having everyone do their best to avoid the seven deadly sins. I think that would be a better place to start.

For those that don’t have them memorized or are not so inclined to look them up, the Seven Deadly Sins are Pride, Greed, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Envy. From where I sit, the United States, in its current incarnation, it guilty of all of seven sins and not the least bit concerned with rectifying or changing that in anyway. We espouse our superiority and force others to adopt our way of life, convinced beyond the shadow any doubt that there is no better lifestyle to be had. We constantly consume, never satisfied or content with what we have and never pausing to really appreciate any of it. We kill for resources and to preserve our way of life but it’s all just smoke and mirrors to mask how truly petty and vindictive we are in our foreign policy. We have selfish ignorant leaders that want nothing more than to maintain their power and so they seek to depose, destroy, limit, censor, obfuscate, or otherwise cloud anything they perceive to be a threat to their station. We are a civilization that peaked in 1969. We put a man on the moon, put a calculator in a wristwatch, and managed to manufacture a device that allows college students to make ramen noodles in just less than three minutes; this device is called a microwave. The iPod, the Internet, the PC, even the cell phone, all of them are great devices built on technology that was intended to move humanity forward, to usher in a new industrial age and allow for mankind to break new frontiers and leap ahead and take the realm of science fiction and make it science fact. Instead we have record companies’ squabbling over who gets the thirteen cents Apple pays them every time someone downloads a song. We have cell phone carriers battling each other over who can get the flashiest startup sequence and produce a camera that allows someone to count the number of lips hairs the girl at the end of the bar has. We’ve got an internet that subsidizes television with video clips of stupidity and insanity consistently at the top, while famous people are tracked ad nauseam in 140 character snippets of their lives. We live in an age where communication between two people is the easiest it has ever been in the history of mankind, and yet we use more words to say nothing of value than ever before.

Substance is lacking from the world. Integrity, dignity, compassion, kindness, selflessness…these words meant something once upon a time and they were qualities to aspire to. We live in a three dimensional world with two dimensional people living two dimensional lives. Each of us indoctrinated by years of fear mongering and conditioned to believe that we are all special and therefore uniquely suited to have a positive impact on the world. I don’t dispute the last part, but I’m wondering when the seven billion on this planet who are not in the spotlight are going to get working on leaving their mark. If each of us is destined to do something extraordinary, why do so few of us enter the mass consciousness? Mankind was made for something great, either by design or by chance, we were made to do something remarkable and inspiring and in the last century we went further and did more than at any point in history before. We made ungodly technological advances, we reached for the stars and we conquered our fears. We refused to believe that something couldn’t be done just because it was hard, we refused to settle for anything less than excellence and gave nothing less than that from ourselves. We were inspired, informed, and willing to push the limits of what we thought possible to achieve something that would last. Our civilization is in decline, but the human race doesn’t have to follow it into the ether. We can save our way of life and we can save ourselves, we just have to be willing to not be afraid and to strive for something more than just the hedonistic “pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain”.

The hardest truth to swallow...

The scabs have festered too long. Left to rot and heal over, layers of flesh have grown too thick and left them too thick to be remembered. How much sadness have I swallowed without acknowledging? At first guess I’d say close to a decade’s worth of misery has been stuffed away with little more than passing recognition. Too strong for too long. I used to think I was worn out and exhausted from all the passion I’d invested in things that came to naught; a shell of my former self, hollow and broken from too much emotional expenditure. Within the last couple of weeks, a myriad of soul searching and introspection has left me to conclude that I’ve perverted my strength into something it was never meant to be.

                I fashioned myself into a paragon of emotional strength and stability, convinced that I had to be able to stand strong for those around me, the beacon on the horizon. I forged myself into something almost perverse, a cold and understanding being that understood better than he felt. While the de facto explanation for so long has been that I ended up this way because of “The Long Saga”, it began well before that. I saw an escape and devoted myself to it, to ridding myself of demons and too many horrors by devoting myself to something better. That dynamic began to rot and eventually turned to poison, but I kept drinking from that well, gulping down as much as I could, subconsciously aware that it beat what I was really running from.

                Of course it ended and so it goes, but I didn’t really deal with it. I swallowed hard and kept trudging on. I lost my best friend; I distanced myself from everyone and everything and just offered up the excuse that I was hurt. But it was still me ignoring what was really going on. I rejected feeling anything because to embrace that pain meant facing everything else I’ve worked so hard to ignore. And it worked well enough, for a while. I poisoned the well of another relationship, knowing it couldn’t work because of how numb I’d become. Now I’m feeling even more drained than before but also more awake, more aware. I’ve spent the last few months watching my father teeter between life and death. His pallor a stark ivory in place of the usual shade I’d grown up with. Long gone are the days of believing him to be invincible, all but forgotten are the hallowed token of hero worship; believing my father a hero in his own right. I see pain, and misery, and suffering, and agony in his face. His entire existence is anguish and torturous agony. Every breath comes with a cost; every movement bears a price tag. No person should endure such unending and unyielding torment. It’s an odd thing to be in a position where you almost wish someone you care about so unflinchingly to be gone from because of the nightmare they endure just to be there for you another day. To recognize the sacrifice…it makes me feel like such a weak and feeble man. He experiences so much more discomfort than I could ever know or articulate and does so much to maintain the brave face, to remain stoic and resolute, to keep the armor from showing cracks of any kind all so that he can keep us from feeling bad or guilty. I used to think myself one of the most selfless people on this planet, but sacrifices like that…I’m speechless.

                Our parents try to set the example, to be the role model to which they hope we will aspire. We grow up becoming amalgams of them and persist toward the horizon, hoping to perpetuate the best qualities we’ve learned and do justice to the reverence we hold for them. The best our forebears can hope for is that we do something to make the world a better place, the best most of them get is a guilty indulgence of pride in our accomplishments. We live our lives working tirelessly to earn their approval, to make them proud, but more than anything to know we’re loved. Unconditional love is something only a parent can offer their children, and it makes it one of the most beautiful and powerful things in existence but is too often taken for granted. It took me watching my father go a little further into the twilight with each passing day; standing idly by while the march of time remains relentless and unyielding as he is carried with it toward his horizon, for me to finally come to terms with the things I’d held onto for too many years. Knowing and facing the reality that he would one day be gone, that our time here is finite, that we are not guaranteed how much time we have here, it’s a sobering realization, perhaps more so than anything else. None of us like to face our own mortality. We cling to the past like a favorite blanket, willing the better days of yore to be something tangible and static.

                When we’re kids we can’t wait to grow up. We spend every waking moment yearning for the day when we have the freedom to do what we choose, unfettered by the judgment or stares of a disapproving or admonition parent, and all too soon we reach that point. We come hurtling into adulthood at terminal velocity and by the time we think to apply the brake we’ve let adolescence pass like a blip on the radar and we’re barely able to recall it. And now more than ever, with the fast paced world we live in, we take so much for granted, we offer true appreciation to so little. We ignore the little miracles. My great grandparents married when my great-grandmother was fifteen and remained faithfully married their entire lives. A commitment like that is something rare and disregarded today amid so much superficiality. My own parents have endured so many unimaginable hardships and remained committed and maintained conviction to the ideal of something bigger than each other. I’m in the midst of purging this reservoir and in so doing I’m making a point to offer thanks. Thanks to my father for the example he sets in doing what needs to be done for the happiness of others, thanks to my great-grandparents for proving that true love does exist and it is a wonderful and beautiful thing. Time is a manmade construct, but we can’t just give ourselves more. I know several of you don’t speak to your parents often or enough, but please, if I can impart anything at all from this forum, take this away, don’t waste another day, another hour, another minute, or even another second. We never know when someone will leave our lives or when they’ll be taken from us in other ways. A grandparent that one day might not recognize you, a parent that is taken suddenly and unexpectedly, a friend that disappears far too suddenly. The people that lift us up, that keep us safe, that make us better people are so rare, so valuable and sadly, so underappreciated. Express thanks. Show your gratitude to your loved ones for the light they bring into your life, they may not be here tomorrow. 

The terrible truth...

Dear god...how long has it been? This place seems almost foreign, different; like stepping into an alternate plane of existence and struggling to find my footing. A stranger in a strange land, there consistency but I'll be damned if I can find it. Every day it's something new. Some new world threat, some madman in some far off third world country where the light of democracy and patriotism have yet to penetrate and yet I still manage to sleep soundly, does that make me sick?
There's far too much suffering, not nearly enough compassion or understanding and everyday we seem to move further from the true purpose of our beings. We are social beings, interconnected to each other in a very complex network of interpersonal connections, yet we treat most every person in our lives as though they're a convenience instead of genuine asset. I weep at where we're headed. I pray for enlightenment to the masses.

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.