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2062

December 14, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

I wake up sometimes when I am not supposed to. At the wrong time. Filled with restless energy. Sometimes epiphanies come. This morning I was filled with them. And one of them was this: I will die in the year 2062. Statistically speaking. Barring accidents, incidents, rage filled bar fights in a state of loutish drunkenness. If I do not challenge anyone to a duel that I lose between now and then and I manage not to anger god I have 17,224 days left on the planet.

We can all relate to the timespan of one day. And I find myself sitting here pondering. What will I do with today? Am I using it as wisely as I possibly can? Am I seizing each moment? Carpe diem. Seize the day.  I have been alive for 16,013 days. Most of them have not been used wisely. We all juggle priorities. Live between conflicting forces. We struggle with agendas, priorities, desires. You probably have some goals in life.

I do.

Do you wake up each morning asking yourself whether those goals are the correct ones for you to find maximal meaning? Do you breathe deeply and center yourself? Review how you lived yesterday? Ask yourself what you can do to make today more of what you’d like it to be?

I do.

I have a personal goal that overrides everything else in my life. One that I want to achieve each and every day for the remaining time I have. Write 1,000 words a day. Some days I write 10,000. Some days I don’t hit the mark. But it’s nice to think that if I live to my expected timeline I have the potential to write 17 million words down. That’s a lot of stories. Maybe I won’t live that long. Perhaps I’ll live longer. I find it important to mark the time, reflect on it, understand what is passing as I move through the time stream. I find it important to capture the moments and learn from them.

Do you?

You only need three to five important goals to achieve a sense of great satisfaction from your life. Take the time to make sure they are the best goals for you. They may change over time. As you deep breathe each morning your own epiphanies may arrive. I hope they do.

I will die in 2062. Perhaps. I will have written 17 million words by then. One hopes. I will have loved, lost, fallen down, stood back up. Tomorrow the countdown timer will be 17,223 and the word count will be 1,000 closer to the 17 million mark. Maybe a little more. Maybe a little less. But I’ve crunched the numbers. Whatever the actual outcomes I have marked a path. I know where I want to go. I know that I will be surprised at how different things look from what I expected when I get there. All of that is perfectly fine.

It’s malleable. This condition of being human. In 2062 I’ll have written 17 million words. I’ll have told the stories I have inside me. What will you have done with your time?

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, On Writing, Personal Tagged With: life, meaning, stories, time, word count

Languages we don’t understand

December 9, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

I dream of a man chained to an engine block. Another man approaches cautiously. Not daring to come very close. He has a dish of food. The feral growls and lunges. Snapping and foaming at the mouth. The caregiver pushes the food within reach using a stick. Insanity comes from many sources. Blood lines. Bad decisions. A betrayal by a brother, a mother, a cousin. Insanity is tenacious.

I dream of you, splayed out before me. Waiting to be penetrated. Waiting to be eaten. Waiting to join me in the shadows of existence.

There is a line of tanks across the side of the mountain. Pointing towards the city filled with graffiti that says “fuck the oppressors” and similar things. The city is filled with buildings cemented together with mortar that contains the dust of the bones of the ancestors of the tribe that lives there. There are no walls high enough to keep out the bad things that live in our hearts. These monsters that come in the night. Demons are an invention we use to excuse the monsters that we are.

His name is Adolph, or Joseph, or Reinhard. Her name is Elizabeth, or Griselda, or Lizzie. We don’t forget what they did. The ghosts of the infamous haunt shadows we try not to walk in. And for some reason, I have always gone into the dark and looked at the shadows. Whispered back to them. The man chained to the engine block is lunging at his caretaker. If he could he would kill the one who brings him food in the dark.

I want to fly and soar. Instead I am running. A rocket is spiraling through the sky over my head. Not the glorious kind that will arc upwards out of the atmosphere and into cold space. This rocket is not designed to explore dreams. This rocket is the short, ugly kind that explodes among the date trees where I live now. An unwelcome package that contains between 40 and 110 pounds of high explosive. The delivery boy who is a few miles away hopes this rocket will end the story of me. I am an invader who walked into this world with a mind full of ideas that are unwelcome in this place.

I am not of this tribe. Not of this land. I am malleable, transitional, a roamer.

We clean up our office. Throw out the detritus of the administration of war. Most of it is written in a language I do not understand. The letters flow from right to left. This is backwards to my mind. Alien. Incomprehensibly foreign and of little value. I do not understand. I do not want to understand. This tribe’s different god who is not my god. My own tribe and their god is alien enough already. No room in my head for these scribbles. The next day my tribe tells me that we have offended our host tribe. The papers we threw out were holy. Honor has been slighted. They want to kill us now.

Yesterday they were friends. Today they will cut our throats. I am numb, anesthetized.

I see him amongst the rest of the warriors. Armored up, armed up, ready to kill. But he is different. He is not shuffling, spitting, watching with veiled eyes and stoic face. He is calm. In another world. Inside a book, a story, a place that keeps him anchored to something that is not a bomb, a bullet, an explosion of violence that could at any moment bring the final black down upon him. I take note. Learn the lesson he is teaching. Escape comes easily. In many forms.

I sleep on a bed of bones in a valley under the stars. War is coming. The oldest whisper. The water of this place will turn to blood. We are hungry for more. It is the oldest cycle.

Do I want your wife, your land, your dreams? What would I steal from you my brother? None of that. I want to be alone with my demons.  The ones who make me tell stories.

I wake up sweating. Missing you. Who is my little fire. I want to mold the very fabric of existence into something that feels like home. But home for me is a city drifting in a dream above the clouds. Home for me is a place that exists only in the pages of a story that is not written yet. On a planet far away where war is only a memory and we are all one tribe. Evolution has more work to do before I can stop being a monster. Before I understand conflict, peace, resolution.

Fire burns and keeps us alive in the cold. Sometimes the light keeps the monsters away at night. The heat is welcome. It provides contrast and context. My hands are such marvelous things. I stare into the fire for a while. Look down at these instruments of mine that can flow out words or wrap themselves around a neck in the night to choke. I wonder what kind of story I will be. In time, the fire turns to coals and I fall asleep thinking of heroes and villains. How they are often one in the same.

I wake up in a different place. At a different time. It has always been so.

The fire is now a conflagration. A diesel truck is burning a few hundred yards away. The cab contains bodies. Badly burned. Souls fled. Charred human remains riddled with metal bits. We drive by and I am the one who is at the wheel. Inside an armored shell. Hoping that fire will be held at bay by the artifices of the engineers who designed this rolling ship I pilot. Miles and kilometers fade into the past and I am still alive. Gathering stories of what it means to be human. Wrestling always with the forces inside that try to hide meaning. That want me to be a lunatic chained to an engine block in the dark. Snarling at the moon and at my brothers and sisters because the world tried to eat me. I was unlucky enough not to lay down and die. I have never been graceful about the prospect of being chewed up.

I am water. I am blood. I am a trickle of life giving sanity in a desert.

Toss and turn. Sometimes scream. Sweating profusely I remain troublesome. To my tribe and yours.

Hello. My name is pen. I don’t fit into anything comfortable. I’m too sharp for that. I leak too much ink. I won’t stop dreaming.

Please come hold me in the dark. Tell me a story of transcendence. I know you drift too. Let’s keep looking for a home. When I’m tired and must sleep I hope you’ll feed my brother lunatic. He’s over there chained to an engine block. His mind is broken but I know that soon you and I will learn how to repair the damage. We’re healers with hard edges. Our scalpels are stories written in languages we sometimes don’t understand.

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, Personal Tagged With: freewrite, remembrance, searching

Throw me into the sun

October 26, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

I have walked inside the mind of a killer. Known him intimately. I have tasted the marrow of his bones. I am the one who knows himself. The strength of my hands, the cords of my arms, the unsubtlety of my guarded eyes. I have wrapped my hands around the necks of the willing to sate the hunger and the fear. As the killer I understand each heartbeat’s value. That every moment is more precious than the last. I am touching the air with my lips. The air is touching your body with its invisible hands. My mind prowls restlessly looking for you. To hunt is to exist.

There is a cold, starry night. We are in a field, my ancestors and I. Looking up and outwards at the stars. Wondering. Always wondering. What secrets do they hold? I have walked inside the mind of an explorer. What is down there? What is over there? What is beyond the places I can see? I can feel the road calling to me. Always. Begging for new traveling companions. Treasuring old ones. Needing the gnawing knowing to expand. My ancestors gave me the gift of cold, starry nights. We share them evermore. Their bones under me compel an outward spiral’s birth. I must lift the veil and go into the darkness afraid and resolute. To explore is to exist.

They censure and censor. The heretic I have been and will always be. The audacity of refusing to bow to kings and priests is in my DNA. A gift from the universe made by gods who do not speak only to the powerful. My gods speak through the starving man, the desperate mother and her sickly child, the peaceful warrior who only wields the blade reluctantly. I have shared many a meal with the downtrodden, the unwelcome, the pariahs and the mad ones. They are mine and I am theirs. Come, let us build a home together and plot against the kings and priests. For they are fat and comfortable as we will never be. I have been the penniless hungry heretic with worn out shoes.

I have known the builders. Something occurred to me once as I watched them building a structure that leapt towards the sky defiantly. About borders and boundaries and invisible lines we draw around ourselves. I want to shatter all of it. I am implacable. Lay down your unnecessary friction and I will bring the grease pot. Draw the static lines to cage me and I will plot an escape. To build is to take a dream and give it life. Your rules are for you. They are not mine. My hammer’s drumbeat rhythm is not one to follow that of the taskmaster’s whip. Allegiance to nations is a sin. I swear my fealty to ideals, not men and their flags. For those are fickle and ever changing. I know how to build and I know how to destroy. I know how to reach for the sky. When they tell me where my feet cannot go I do not listen. When they tell me where my hands cannot reach I spit at them and reach anyway.

I will taste your ideas. Each in turn. I will know you. In the deepest places where you do not know yourself. And when I am ready, when there is nothing left to taste, to explore, to learn, I will ask you to throw me into the sun. I know that it is my destiny to burn. I do not know which sun will take me in when that time finally comes.

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite Tagged With: existential, explorer, exploring, human condition, prose, short

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