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stories are the bones of everything

Personal

To flow freely

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There are a million things you can be. Will be. You will not be told this secret by most you meet. For they are afraid. They live in a world that is finite without the understanding that all things begin and end over and over. Finite fits inside infinite. We are again and again. We are eternal. Not in the small way that some storybooks tell us.

The inevitability is that your atoms will, at some point you do not fully control, be scattered and rearranged. You are composed now. Your story has a start and a finish. There are only so many chapters. What most people fail to see clearly is that the story of you and the story of me are part of a bigger story. The story of us. All of us. We all swim together in an ocean of time. At different moments we might tread in its gentle flow and float together for a while. I know that the moments when I can swim with you might be fleeting.

That is why, when I am bobbing along in the timestream and you happen to be caught in the same current I am, that is important. You might be my companion for a moment or a lifetime. I don’t know. To flow freely is my destiny. I have spent too much time and energy trying to do something that no one swimming in an ocean of time should try to do. Staying in one place should not be the goal.

I will flow freely. To wherever it is that I end. To begin again in a new incarnation that is not going to be what I expect. As I wait for the gloriousness of not knowing to arrive and wash me away it occurs to me that I would like to touch you. I’ll try to remember your eyes. Their color. I’ll try to remember if you laughed and what it sounded like. I will write down the one thing you said to me in that moment that was worth remembering and learning from. Even if it is only for a moment. You were trying to teach me something in the moment that we floated together. I’ll ponder and remember and try to know what it was.

What if that moment turns into a lifetime? It could you know. The ripples and echos and eddies of us seem like beautiful untapped potential. At the beginning of this story I did not understand that I will pass a million faces floating in the sea of time with me and perhaps only see them once. That all of those faces contain something I should try to know.

It’s why now, if you see me float by, and are paying attention you will notice that I am staring. I want to know because I do not. Know how much time is left before my story ends. Or your story ends. And where the ocean will receive this thing I call me into itself. So I look deep into your eyes as you pass by. To see if you will give me something worth chewing on, worth writing about, worth a dance or a song or a painting.

And when the next me comes along without remembering the last me I hope that something I knew in the part of the ocean where I met you helps the you and I who come next know something new. We are all meant to flow freely, to swim until we are tired, and then to sink down into dreams and be remade.

There are a million things you can be. Will be. Which one would you like to know about before this story ends? Let’s take a moment together and float in the question.

There are only two kinds of people

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There are only two kinds of people. I have been both of them at different times. I suspect you have too if you’ve been around a little while.

In my 20’s I loved using the word fag. I threw it around in online gaming forums like free candy. Someone got the better of me and I got fragged. Then my mic went on. “You’re a fag.” Yep. That was my brain to mouth without filters in action. I don’t do that these days. Doing didn’t make me a better competitor. It just pissed off the person on the receiving end.

In my 20’s I loved to argue about everything and I would never back down an inch. I knew what freedom was. I knew all my rights. I knew how to fix every social ill that plagues our planet and our species. I knew that I had a high IQ and I thought that entitled me to being heard and respected.

I wanted other people to hear me. I thought I deserved it. The problem was that I didn’t want to hear them. I wanted other people to learn from me. I didn’t want to learn from them. I already knew everything. I couldn’t have been more wrong about that.

In my 20’s I was condescending. I was arrogant. I loved to argue. I’m in my 40’s now.

I’m still condescending and arrogant inside but the rough edges have been sandpapered. I’ve walked through some storms that I managed to survive somehow. Storms that I elected to walk into of my own free will. I still love to argue but I approach if from a completely different place. I might think you’re a whiny little bitch, or that there’s a double standard about the use of the word nigger depending on what color your skin, eyes and hair are. I might think a thousand different things are unfair, unjust or nonsensical. I might find you utterly boring. It won’t come out of my mouth anymore. Why? Because you don’t ever prove a point by crushing someone or turning up the volume to a point that no one hears any of the words anymore.

Annihilation tactics never turn an enemy into a friend. Escalation doesn’t solve problems unless you’re willing to bomb those arrayed against your point of view or stance into non-existence. That isn’t my go to place. I’m not a sociopath or a psychopath.

So somewhere between shouting out “fag” and creating a bunch of unneeded bad feelings arguing about everything under the sun I had an epiphany. Or a thousand. Here’s one of the most important ones.

I learned that enemies can become friends. To make that a possibility I needed to stop blurting things out and start paying attention to what the enemy was doing and saying. That guy who fragged me all the time knew something I didn’t. He had tactics I could have learned from. He wasn’t a fag. He was a better player than me. If I had been paying attention to what he knew back then instead of flailing around feeling angry about losing I might have combined what he knew with what I knew to improve my gaming experience. Which, at that time, was pretty much the world I lived in and cared about. Priorities change. What you care about changes. What you believe in changes. People usually don’t change. Until they start listening and stop talking.

That’s a lesson it took me nearly 20 years to absorb. You don’t become better at anything by pissing people off. Unless your ultimate goal is to be a world champion douche bag. If you want to be heard you have to shape the message in a way the doesn’t immediately incense your audience or potential audience. I eventually stopped using the word fag. I have used other expletives in the past in attempts to win arguments or save face. Now I just avoid the argument in the first place. I don’t care about saving face anymore because I’m focused on learning from failures as much as I learn from successes.

If you believe that Jesus Christ is the one true path to an eternal reward I’m not going to convince you otherwise until you are ready to consider other possibilities. If you think the CIA introduced crack into American ghettos to keep the black man down then one white guy isn’t going to change your mind no matter how eloquently he speaks. If you believe the moon landing was faked, 9/11 was an inside job or the Tea Party will save us from the downfall of America (whatever that is), I’m not going to change your mind before you decide that other possibilities should be weighed. You have to be ready to hear the message.

What’s the point of writing all this? It’s a message to all the really smart, high IQ, outside the box people who are struggling to be heard. You probably have important things to say. We all have a soapbox that we would like to have an audience for. If you want people to hear how great atheism is here’s a hint: don’t start off by telling them how stupid their current theology is. It doesn’t work. I know from personal experience.

Starting a conversation with “you’re wrong and here’s why” is like trying to pickup a woman in a bar by telling her that you are repulsed by her saggy breasts and the hairy mole on her face. Unless she’s an emotional masochist that approach isn’t going to work. You have a soapbox. You have an agenda. You have priorities. So does everyone else. Take the time to hear them and you might have a chance of convincing them to hear you. If they raise the volume try lowering yours. You’d be amazed how effective it can be to simply wait and listen without taking offense. I don’t take anything personally anymore until someone starts trying to punch me.

I never won arguments in my 20s. I spent too much time getting angry. I sometimes won video gaming contests but my blood pressure and my belly both increased when measured over a period of time. Shouting out “fag” or “nigger” or “I’ll kill you mother fucker” never helped me make a point about anything. It didn’t help me win. It did ensure a few people hated my guts in more than one online forum or gaming den. I’ve learned from those ineffectual years. I’m still learning. Here’s where I’m at in this moment.

Want to convince people of something? Try these tactics:

  • Endless patience. Be ready to wait a lifetime for them to be ready to hear you. Don’t get invested in changing their mind until they are invested in new possibilities. Which brings us to…
  • Understand why you believe what you do. If you don’t know why you hold a certain viewpoint no one else is going to be convinced either. It’s always been that way. The status quo doesn’t mean there isn’t a viable or superior set of choices. Fail. My parents told me so. No parent knows everything. No parent is infallible. Fail. It’s the law. Total fail. It used to be the law that you could own human slaves. The law is a dumb, blind animal enforced by mostly unimaginative people who carry guns to enforce rules passed by more mostly unimaginative people. Which brings us to…
  • Explain your belief/stance/solution/viewpoint from a humble place. Realize that you haven’t walked in the same shoes as your potential friend and convert. They have a different experience of the world and they look through different lenses. That’s OK as long as they are willing to listen to you and you’re willing to listen to them. Never ever start with “you’re wrong and here’s why.” For fuck’s sake you just used up some of that endless patience above waiting for an unlikely moment when they were contemplative enough to hear you. Which brings us to…
  • The point is not to win. The point is to plant seeds. They might grow into something later. They might not. But for most people epiphanies don’t happen in an instant. Most people have to connect a lot of dots before they see the big picture. You on your soapbox on any given day or in any given moment are only one of the dots in that person’s life. Finally we come to the most important part of being alive…
  • It isn’t about you. It’s about wisdom. Wisdom is bigger than any one person. Somehow, through a series of unfortunate mishaps and close calls, I came the conclusion that there are only two kinds of people. The ones I can learn from and the ones I can learn from. I learn things that I want to incorporate into my own life and journey from the first kind. I learn things that I don’t want to incorporate into my journey from the second kind. That means everyone has something to teach me. You cannot be a good teacher until you’re a good student. Spend a lot of time talking with the first kind of people you can learn from. Identify and observe the second kind of people you can learn from. Try to avoid close engagements as they are likely to result in hostility and bad feelings no matter how endlessly patient you think you are. By engaging the first and watching the second kind of people I have improved myself. I believe you can too.
    In my 20’s I was the kind of person who taught people how not to be and what not to emulate. In my 40’s I’m trying to be the kind of person who listens enough to be worth being heard. It’s not a science. It’s an art form. It’s not a static thing. It evolves. That is the nature of being human. You aren’t supposed to form a set of viewpoints and then spend your life telling other people how great they are.

There are only two kinds of people. The ones who are evolving and learning and the ones who have to be dragged along on the trip kicking and screaming. I’ve mostly stopped kicking and screaming at this point. I’ve started paying attention to my traveling companions. I’ve realized that some of them are magnificent, beautiful souls. I’m starting to understand just how amazing the journey is. I’m less scared of being alive than I have ever been. I see the stars and I want to go there with you.

Moral turpitude

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“Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– Clive Staples Lewis

There are many forces in the world that attempt to regulate and control the activities of the individual human being. Nation-states, religious institutions, legal courts and municipalities are just a few examples of these forces. These various concentrations of power are an attempt to keep us from destroying each other during the course of our daily lives. Sometimes they work in this endeavor. Sometimes they just clean up the mess that’s left behind after we exert our free will. Sometimes these institutions make things worse.[su_pullquote]Moral Turpitude  A phrase used in Criminal Law to describe conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty, or good morals.[/su_pullquote]

Crimes involving moral turpitude have an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, or depravity with respect to a person’s duty to another or to society in general. Examples include rape, forgery, robbery, and solicitation by prostitutes.

Many jurisdictions impose penalties, such as deportation of Aliens and disbarment of attorneys, following convictions of crimes involving moral turpitude. The idea of what constitutes moral turpitude and how an individual should be punished for engaging in such behavior changes drastically depending on time and place. A gay man in Russia in 2014 may be punished with a beating or by having containers of human urine poured over his head. It’s true. I watched a documentary containing video evidence last night. A gay man in Afghanistan is likely to face little to no backlash. They reckon the year differently over there, and that man probably won’t admit he is gay, but in the time and space I’m referring to it is perfectly fine for two men to copulate as long as they don’t talk about it publicly. Today in the United States a gay man can get married to another gay man in some places. Here we are – the human race – spinning through space on a ball of rock. And somewhere in Africa a gay man is being killed for being gay.

You’d find lots of people who, if interviewed, would passionately claim that being gay or engaging in homosexuality is a crime of moral turpitude. You’d find another large swath of humanity that would argue the exact opposite. I fall into that category. I feel no physical or sexual attraction to my own sex. On the other hand I have to ask myself how something consensual can be wrong. Human beings who engage in consensual behavior that doesn’t harm anyone else are not engaging in moral turpitude.

That’s where things tend to get fuzzy. Some people think they are being harmed if you do something they disagree with. If you do something that offends them. If you engage in behavior that they themselves wouldn’t engage in. These people are wrong. Human freedom is more important than your personal moral code. Human freedom is more important than your personal agenda. Human freedom is more important than anything you believe in.

When a human individual engages in behavior that makes you uncomfortable you always have the option to disengage. The only exceptions are when an individual perpetrates force or fraud against others. These are nonconsensual activities. You have every right to defend yourself in such cases. I study the communities and power bases in the world around me on a daily basis. I watch the ways that my fellow humans attempt to exert unnecessary control over one another. I spend a lot of time thinking about moral turpitude and my own moral compass.

I’ve made a million mistakes in my life to date. Engaged in a million choices that could have been improved upon. I’m probably guilty of lots of moral turpitude according to the people who decide that sort of thing. I am fortunate enough to have been born in a society that has mostly supported my ability to learn from each action, decision and mistake I’ve made without locking me in a cage, torturing me or stoning me to death.

I’m still allowed to exercise my free will and to publish my thoughts. These freedoms are gifts I don’t want to squander. They lead me to a mental plane where I spend a lot of time reflecting on the idea that I should be contributing to the evolution of personal freedoms in every human society I am able to engage with.

Moral turpitude. It’s not worth much if you use it to censor or censure people who aren’t harming others. Which leads me back to the quote at the top of this piece of writing. I won’t force my conscience on you unless you are directly harming others. Can you say the same?

The memory of storms

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There is only the memory of a storm. Lingering on my skin, haunting my dreams. Baghdad, Iraq. In the year 2006. Sounds and smells come back the most. I try to suppress them because of the panic attacks and the way those have crippled me at times. I haven’t had one for a while.

Now, when the memories come unbidden, it is usually an overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss. The awareness of my own fragility. The death of innocence. The inevitability of endings and an understanding that the privilege of memory is not granted to everyone.

All the fragments came together in the storm my last night in Iraq. I slept eventually but first my brain forced me to travel unwanted pathways. Made me ask why my life was intact when so many others had been shattered. When so many souls had leaked out onto the ground or been dispersed into bits and fragments inside the concussive blasts of hatred that I felt many times. Those punctuation marks only frayed my mind. They failed to shatter my body.

It doesn’t rain often in Baghdad. In a year we had perhaps a half dozen storms that actually contained life giving water sent down from the skies. My last night in Iraq I experienced one of those. The air became heavy with that smell of impending wet while my unit shuffled from line to line suffering the endless insults of modern war. The wind picked up as we finished our checklists and winded our way through the endless t-walls, machines and tired soldiers to take our sustenance. By the time we returned to our tent to retire, the sand was blowing into our faces. Stinging our skin.

The tent walls moved and sang to us in harmony with the angry air outside that night. As the storm’s fury mounted, I wondered why I was lucky enough to be alive. My overwhelming sense was that I wouldn’t make it through the night. That the storm had been sent as a last cruel joke. I felt that since none of the mortars or rockets had taken me out I was due to die in the tent that night. If a sniper didn’t have my mark, then surely the tent would fall in on me and finish the job.

I finally drifted off into a troubled sleep thinking about all the things that hadn’t killed me. Some men and women can fall asleep anywhere after being exposed to war. I haven’t mastered that skill. I was probably the last one to fall asleep that night.

I woke up to the sound of thunder crashing. The tent walls were moving so much I was certain they would collapse in on me at any point. I could hear vehicles grinding by and see lightning through the entrance flaps as the wind played games with my worldview.

Instead of waiting for the tent to collapse and end the nightmare I’d been living, I did what human beings do. I fought my way through the chaos and uncertainty to relieve my bladder. The memories of that short journey are burned into my brain.

Endless convoys of sand colored armored gun trucks moving through the darkness sometimes illuminated by the sodium lights that seem to be omnipresent inside U.S. forward operating bases. In the rare moments between thunder crashes, shrieking gusts of wind, the sound of rain hitting sand and the grinding, rumbling noises of convoys the closest thing to silence was the constant hum of diesel generators powering the camp. War has a very distinct set of sights, sounds and smells that I cannot forget.

That storm, on that particular night, added a level of surreal to the backdrop. The storm ensured I will not lose the tableau of that night until I am dead. It burned in the significance of my fragility, the randomness of man’s hatred towards man and the fact that I was supposed to go home in the morning.

The tent survived nature’s fury. No mortar landed on me during my fitful sleep. The chartered jet we flew across an ocean to return to our world did not go down in the ocean as I suspected it would.
But that storm is still raging in my head. Reminding me that one day I won’t be able to escape an ending to my story. Storms remind me that I shouldn’t waste time. Remind me that the routine always holds the potential to become life changing.

What am I doing with my time? How am I spending the moments between storms? I lost a friend yesterday, long before I expected it. His storm came in a different form but it had the same net effect as the one I experienced on my last night in Baghdad. His tent fell in on him and became a burial shroud.

The memory of storms reminds that I should use the moments I have left intentionally. That I should live mindfully. That I should choose my relationships carefully. That every moment is an investment in becoming. Connectedness and love mean everything. I wish I’d understood that lesson better the night I was waiting for my plane out of Baghdad.

To my friend who just passed, I want to say, thank you for allowing me to know you. Thank you for letting me use the memory of your final storm to reinforce lessons I believe will cause my life to resonate more richly. Thank you for serving as an example of kindness and love that will allow me to be better for the people around me.

My final storm is coming. Yours is too. The only question is what will we do with the time between this moment and that one?

In memory of Dan

It was like this…

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The human brain is a funny thing. It doesn’t really hold on to the past very well. I speak for myself of course. Every brain is different. Some people, I’m told, have photo recall. They see remember everything exactly as it happened.

I know a girl who forgets some things almost immediately. Other things, her brain clamps down on and holds close with the teeth of a vicious attack dog. Her brain does one thing with the past and mine does another. We’re different that way. Someone else I used to know turned everything into a life or death emergency. Yet another person who passed through my life insisted on revisiting every recent event in the hopes that all concerned would agree with her version of how things went. She had a compulsive need that way.

My brain turns memories into stories. Softens the edges. Creates heroes and villains. Adds richness and descriptive details. Changes the timeline for dramatic effect. Sometimes I think that makes me a liar, and sometimes I think it makes me a good storyteller. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

I have to deal with the way my brain holds on to the past and processes it. Acknowledging my own tendency to distort the past and turn it into an entertaining story is important.

I can process a trauma by making my own role something I can live with. But that might not be what actually happened in the moments. In the story I might be brave. In real life I probably wasn’t. My hands were shaking. My teeth were chattering. I was behind a wall when the bullets started flying. Not running towards them.

There are 1,000 ways to get through events that should have or could have killed you or left you mentally broken. My way of coping is to make the thing into a story. But I mix up the pieces and parts of everything after a while. The faces get stuck on other bodies. The weather is more menacing and alive. Timelines get stretched and compressed. Antiheroes are born out of the shells of boring people.

In my stories, the omniscient narrator is me without the omniscience. How it happened and how it happened in my head are often two different things. Especially after years pass before I write the story. Often times I change details or major plot twists intentionally. I’m a fiction writer after all. Most of my stories start out that way intentionally. In my stories the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred. It happens to you too. Trust me.

It was like this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as what actually happened. My brain tricks me. Chances are yours does the same thing. Memory is all we have sometimes to chart the course guiding us into the future.

Remember that. Looking back through the distorted lens of your own filters can be inspiring but it can also be deceiving. Stories are an important part of being human. Be open to the way others see things too. Hear their stories and pick the pieces that fit into your own.

No guide for life is the complete truth because every single one of them has been produced and filtered through human brains. In a world filled with a hundred million stories, pick and choose the ones you believe in carefully.

Make your own stories. Write them down before too much time passes. Pick out the truths that resonate with you and live your own fantasies. Memory is what you make of it.

Polyamory and pain

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I am an alien. The worlds that I carry around with me are not mine. They belong to the story. I am only a caretaker. My destiny is to give away everything. To you and others.

Rugged mountains covered with shantytowns and the sprawl of human life set the backdrop. I observe this place that is not my home from inside an illusory bubble of safety. My routine is that there is no routine. My companions are aliens too. Unwelcome. Our routes remain the same, but nothing else does. Except the chaos.

All is dust. Every tree looks tired. Animals labor under a sun I thought I knew and didn’t. This is not my world. A maelstrom of activity means that I am always watching. The natives are not friendly. My companions and I watch for magnetic bombs in every hand. Have you ever seen your death in someone else’s eyes? I have.

We study every vehicle and every pile of trash carefully. Things in this world explode, unexpectedly. With great violence. Anyone passing by could have a grenade. And the grenade might be wearing bits of me at any moment. If not today perhaps tomorrow. Sudden, violent endings hide among the throngs of teeming life here. Patiently. Waiting.

I see the girl. For a moment the rest of the details are fuzzy. Then clarity comes. She is perhaps 14. Possibly 15. Maybe 12. She is beautiful. I should not be able to see that. Because her head should be covered. In modesty. It is not. The girl is chained to a tree. The tree is chained to this world that is not mine. I am chained to the memory of the time and space.

She is bleeding from her forehead. She is crying. The rocks hitting her are uncaring. The boys throwing them are cruel. They are laughing. And I have rules to follow. I want to stop my vehicle. I want to get out of my armored sphere of unreality. Unchain the girl from the tree. Save her.

But I don’t. I keep going, saving only her memory. I carry her world inside mine. The rules were yours then. They are mine now. Because I took them away from you for doing this to me.

I woke up one morning not long ago and thought of the girl. I love her. I failed her. I thought of you. I love you too. I thought about how much I hurt you and others. When I give you pain, it is hers and mine and yours.

When I hold you tenderly it is her face that I see sometimes. The girl chained to the tree in that other world. The one I am the caretaker for. Please let me hurt you in a different way. One that is good for you. And let me be a part of your story until it ends. Because I’ll never know what happened to that other girl I love.

I am an alien. Love me. Better than I love you. I need polyamory and pain. Do you understand why? I can never stop loving her. Never stop failing her. Never stop trying to save you in the midst of it all.