penfist

stories are the bones of everything

time

It just feels like a waste of time

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The political system in the United States is broken

I watched the first presidential debate of 2016 last night. Gross.

Why do I have to choose between a shady, back-room power deals career politician and a shady, back-room power deals career businessman? Both of them are liars. Both of them are flip-floppers. Both of them are power hungry. These are not qualities I can support in a leader.

Every logical fallacy I am aware of was at play in the debate last night. These two individuals are not the best choices to lead the United States for the next four years. We shouldn’t have to choose between two paragons of fail. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not root causes. They are not the disease. They are the symptoms of a bigger problem.

The virus of the two-party system, where all opinions are slowly silenced until there are only two voices left. A system of decision making that offers only two choices is not healthy. The debate last night didn’t offer any real dialog about the problems average Americans face. It didn’t offer any real perspectives. That’s because, in the United States, minorities who aren’t bought are still silenced. That’s the real problem.

If you’re a socially progressive and fiscally conservative, like I am, there isn’t a real choice. If you believe politicians should be honest and responsible, you don’t have a real choice this election cycle. If you think government should operate transparently, always choosing to balance personal liberties with social infrastructure that demands personal responsibility, neither of these two is palatable.

They will both hoard power. They will both continue the vast, non-transparent, morally bankrupt security state we’ve been building since Sept. 11, 2001. We’ll keep using drones to extra-judicially murder those who, real or imagined, represent some sort of threat to this nation-state. All of our options will continue being boiled down into soundbites that lack any true substance. I can’t vote for that. I won’t vote for it. I don’t want to build a wall, and I don’t want to create more failed states like Libya and Syria in the name of the American people.

We owe it to ourselves to destroy the two-party system that offered up these two as our best hope for turning the ship before it collides with an iceberg named mediocrity.

I asked my girlfriend to register to vote. “It just feels like a waste of time,” she said. She’s right.

Until we manage to destroy the two-party system, this country is going to continue its downhill trajectory. It doesn’t matter which party wins in the upcoming election. The problem isn’t the candidates, it’s the system that offered them up as saviors.

Sunflower man

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It wrecked me. Watching him.

He knew his purpose. I thought I knew mine.

Time has proven me wrong. Time has latched onto my brain and caused me to think about him. What was done to sunflower man. It’s wrong.

I had the might of an empire protecting me. How brittle that turned out to be.

He had his faith. Or many faiths. He watered every day. That was the thing he believed in most. His beneficiaries thrived because of the tender care he gave them.

Dust storms came. Bombs shook everything. The world turned orange. It turned loud. Nothing was certain during that year I spent in hell.

Except that he would find water and pour it out on those golden yellow survivors he created. They were never orange. Even during the hellish dust storms, if you got close enough, they remained bright yellow around the perimeter, with a dark brown center made of seeds. How beautiful.

Because. Sunflower man tended and gardened. In circumstances that would make most of us crumble into pieces.

I don’t know how he came up with the seeds, or the clay pots, or the soil. He just did. That earned my respect. And caused me to think of him. Almost a decade later, I remember his haunted face. Serene and dignified.

Imagine. Invaders coming to your metropolis. Or your rural farm. That part matters not. What matters is how you react when the reality you’ve known your whole life is taken away. Sunflower man. He knew what to do.

Give something life in the midst of hell. Pour the water out. Keep the pot tended carefully. Provide a stick to hold up the fragile nature of existence. I sometimes wonder where he is. Deep in dreams, I tremble and shake.

Shamed. By his bravery and my cowardice. While he grew life, I was a mouthpiece. While he carried nothing but a watering can and his resolve, I shook and cowered inside the latest technology. Body armor and a gun can never defeat a sunflower man.

I’ve learned my lessons the hard way. I hope you’ll hear his voice passed on through mine.

Perhaps I’ll recover a picture of sunflower man one day. If so, I hope to share it with you. He’s my idol. Far braver than most. Far more determined. Far less lucky.

All my respect is his.

 

Pain

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“It hurts,” he screams. I want it to hurt. I turn the dial a little bit to the right. I took it. The dial I’m turning. From an old lady I killed. After it all went south. I got it off the record player on the shelf. Before I burned her and her house down to the ground.

Electricity is precious now. I use it to inflict the pain back into them. I like pissing it away. Into. The ones responsible for this nightmare that pretends to be life. I used to feel OK. That was a long time ago. Now I am haunted. And all of you are going to be haunted too. That thing you give me. Hopelessness. Endless torment. It’s coming back to eat you. I took the clay you gave me and wrapped it around myself as a shield. I’m invulnerable now. For a little while.

And I’m going to do every single person I can. Like I did that old lady. She pretended to be so sweet. But her teeth were rotten. Like the world. The one you were stupid enough to let me be born into.

Fuck you, mother. You gave me good grammar and a sense of overriding guilt. And not much else I can think of. So go fuck yourself. With those sharp fingernails you cultivated oh so carefully. That false piousness fooled no one.

He’s screaming again. Cursing me. I don’t have time to listen to this. Time to turn the dial a little further to the right.

It all flows how it’s supposed to. A teacher I had once told me that. It sort of stuck. All through everything falling apart. The world heated up. The oil ran out. The stocks went down. Inflation went up. You left and I started going crazy.

“It hurts,” he screams. Again. I turn the dial all the way up until he can’t scream anymore.

Now it’s my turn. But I’m quiet. I have a stockpile of pills that keep the screams away. For now. They’ll run out some day. My turn is coming.

Finding god

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I try to stay away from politics and religion because they tend to be divisive. Sometimes I cannot. There are events that affect us all. They sweep across the world like a fire. Think of the crucifixion of the Christ. Or the death of Muhammad by fever in the year 632. These events are still affecting the world stage today. They have been since they happened. I’d like to say that these two historical figures claiming to be agents of a divine being brought peace into the world but events often disagree. There are multiple competing storylines that fade backwards into human history before the invention of writing. Stories wrapped around history. These affect our psyche in manifold ways.

It is the year 632. The prophet, a self-proclaimed agent of the divine, is dead. He has left no heir apparent. His followers have a difference of opinion about who is to lead the faith. Should it be Mohammad’s companion Abu Bakr or Hussein ibn Ali, Muhammad’s closest living relative? The argument resulted in battles that continue to this day. Ali was killed in one of these battles. He was beheaded. We see this happening still in the name of those who claim god as their own. The new religion split into two distinct sects. They have been fighting ever since, with each other and with anyone who disagrees on the finer points of their version of god.

It is the year 2005. I am a man wearing a uniform in a city not that far from where Ali was beheaded. I am an invader following orders. My days and nights consist primarily of producing war propaganda, hearing bombs going off and worrying about bullets, mortars and rockets falling from the sky and ending me. It is a surreal world full of intense psychic stressors. I live in the palace complex of a deposed dictator. He was a Sunni. I am told we are there to bring freedom to all the Shias he oppressed. I am told we are there to bring prosperity and hope. For some of us this idealistic belief is the driving force. For others the impetus is to bring our society’s values to the backwater country we are in. Still others are there simply because they were told to be. They do not believe in a cause and are simply doing a job.

All around, outside the walls and sometimes inside, people are dying. Horribly. In the name of god and vengeance. Everyone sees god through his or her personal lens and from the context provided by their own past experiences and present circumstances. At the height of my time there, estimates of the death toll in my host city range from 4,000 to 15,000 casualties per week. The air stinks of reprisals, fear and suffering. I feel the bombs going off inside people’s heads and outside the gates. I see the aftermath of the violence. Prepare stories about how we are liberating prisoners from torture chambers. Write about Sunnis being captured by Shias and having their heads poked full of holes using power drills. The Sunnis respond by blowing up open air markets full of Shias. People die for many reasons. Some die for no reason at all. I am entering middle age and at this time and in this place I find myself those around me are struggling to emerge from the events of the middle ages.

I survive 2005 and 2006. So many around me do not. Those who do must of necessity carry away scars that are both physical and mental. One cannot exist in the midst of violence without carrying the echoes of that violence around. The scars of my past contain the many ideas of god within themselves. What is this word? I refuse to capitalize it intentionally because I want to remind my brothers and sisters of humanity of one thing: you do not own this idea any more than I do. Your god or gods are yours to worship as you see fit up to the point where you are forcing those ideas down my throat as car battery acid or into my head at the tip of a power drill.

It is 2015. There are two brothers. Raised to believe in a version of god I do not understand. This god is easily offended. I suspect this god is also weak. This god never speaks except through angry humans who believe that those who disagree with their version of events must be executed in the name of untouchable and intangible ideas that they have in their head. They have rules that include extreme silliness. My god is so important that you may not draw a picture of him. My god is so important that you may not destroy any of his words. They make the holy into the unholy by waging war in the name of something I don’t understand.

What kind of god would need followers like this? Not the kind I can fathom. This could never be the lens through which I see the world. Where all of existence is merely a game of chess pieces played by a being that demands I slaughter others to honor it following esoteric rules made up thousands of years ago and often stolen from the esoteric rules of other gods worshipped by generations past all the way back into the beginning of written language.

There is no one true god. Because each of us has our own version. And this is why we often fight. Over disagreements about what this unseeable, unknowable thing inside us really is. Yes. You understood me. God is inside each of us. Some of us have more than one god inside ourselves. And whether there is only one or there are many they are all the same thing. Because all the atoms and molecules of the universe are connected. All the energy is connected. All the stars send their light across all the universe. It takes a long time to travel that distance.

Which makes me wonder why such tiny beings as ourselves spend so much time and energy fighting about what god is. Wouldn’t it be easier to spend some of these resources exploring everything we cannot see yet. I’d rather do that than to spend all my time living inside books that claim to be the only true explanation of god. Such books often contain wisdom. And wisdom is not a static thing. Like the universe wisdom is a growing, living thing. It does not stand still. It does not use force to control others. It uses patience, tolerance and understanding.

I am student trying to learn. I am a mote that is self-aware. I am a wound that wants to heal.

Maybe all the aberrations I have experienced are there to teach me what god is and what god is not. For myself only. If others want to follow my example or take a piece of it they can choose to do so in freedom and without expectations on my part. Here are words crafted as fragments of my own journey.

I am finding god. God is not a bomb. God is not a bullet. God is not contained inside a book. These things are only tools used to create or destroy. To build or tear down. God is inside you and all around you. God is the fabric of everything. God belongs to everyone. I am not god’s exclusive messenger and neither are you. If you have been given anything worthwhile in this existence it is the choices you make about what you do with all the information available to you. Choose your paths wisely.

God does not act alone. God does not demand. God is not vengeful. God does not become offended and is never offensive. God does not hate. God cannot be drawn.

God is community. God is reasoned debate. God is exploration of the self and of the universe. God is infinite and in everything. God understands love that seems impossible.

Each of us is nothing more than a possibility. Each of us is only here for a few moments. I hope you are finding god in a peaceful, thoughtful way today. If we could all agree to pursue spirituality from this perspective the world would change drastically for the better. I believe it is possible. In the cosmic scheme of things it shouldn’t take more than a few eye blinks. While I wait for those blinks to transpire, god bless you and keep you. May you be inspired in ways that make your journey rich and full of epiphanies, laughter and pleasure. I hope you find your measure of humility, strength and courage. Unto you be granted the qualities of mercy, wisdom and a thirst for knowledge.

I am made of scars and ideas. I am made of love and weakness. I would rather know you than kill you. I am a man who does not believe in anything but the fluidity of existence and the journey. Ideas are not static. Knowledge grows and spawns new wisdom. I am not standing still and neither are you. We are all spinning through space. Together. I try not to lose sight of that.

It is the year 2015. What will you do with this eye blink?

Signed,

An apostate

2062

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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?

Forgotten

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I was in the library browsing. I go there when I’m lost. To find myself in the pages. Among the stacks. The smell of books is the smell of home.

I noticed an old volume with a tattered, worn red binder. Not in its right place. As I stooped to look I wondered why it would be on the floor under the lowest of the shelves. Almost out of sight. The title read Mysteries Past, Present and Future. When I picked it up the book it shivered. Which made me drop it. Books should not shiver.

So I looked at it a while. A thing that should not do what it had done. The pages had opened when it fell. I made the mistake of looking too long. That’s when I fell into the book. The wood shelves and the smell of home disappeared as  gravity pulled me in. My dress fluttered in the wind made by my fall and I screamed a little but forgot to make a sound. The scream echoed around in my head. My landing was gentle and unexpected.

I am standing on the greenest grass I have ever felt wondering why my shoes are not on my feet and pondering where they have gone. The beautiful man is looking at me. His eyes are fire. His hair is long and fine. He is carved or chiseled. I cannot decide which. I want to touch him but I am afraid because I know he is not real.

“I am a poem,” he says. I say nothing. What would a girl say to a poem anyhow. We are silent for a while.

I see the grass blow gently in the wind. I look down at my feet and wiggle my toes. The sun warms me. He looks at me and I do not know anything except that I want to know everything.

“I used to be war,” he says. “But I was tired so I became a poem. I had died one too many times and the bleeding was making me weak. I was eternally hungry and I needed to be something else. Would you like to know me?”

I only nodded. Unable to speak.

The sun turned black. I disappeared and we were stars with the eyes of eagles. He twinkled at me from inside impossibility and then all the stars around us twinkled. “Those are ghosts,” he said. They are all already dead. This light we are is always moving, always changing, always being reborn in other universes. I am a poem.” He twinkled again.

I felt the baby inside me. And it was him. He spoke to me. “Life is the greatest gift. The understanding of love washes all sins away in tsunamis that cannot be denied. When I was hungry on the floor of the library you loved me without knowing what it was you were about to love. I thank you.” He was born then, in an instant.

I screamed in pain and thankfulness as he stepped into the world from between my legs. He looked at me in a way no one ever has or ever will again. The oldest newborn. Helpless, silent, all knowing. Needing me. Needing love. Needing to exist.

“I am a poem,” he cried. I understood everything and I held him in my arms. We didn’t speak for a while. He warmed me. I warmed him. Then he suckled and the understanding grew. Something shifted again.

I am standing in front of a mirror looking at myself. And he is standing behind me. In a warmly lit boudoir that is tastefully decorated. We are both naked and wrinkled. He is covered in a story that is tattooed on his skin. The words flow downward from his neck. They are coiling around his form. Alive and ever changing. The color of his eyes is changing too. He wraps his arms around me and whispers in my ear.

“Isn’t time beautiful? Can you see yet?” I realize that I can. And he starts to pleasure me from behind. We are old and this is the loveliest thing I’ve ever done. I close my eyes and let him fill me up. He moans and I moan and we become a song that rises and falls gently in waves.

We sing together for a while and enjoy our time as a harmony. We read for a while and we become stories. We dance for a while and we become an endless flow. Time stands still and time spreads out in every direction seeking life and understanding of life. I can see from the beginning to the end with my eyes closed.

When I open them I am in the library again. My home. Among the stacks. Waiting to be instructed. I have lived here forever. In infinite possibilities and endless gnawing wishes for understanding. In words that undulate and change depending on the vantage point from which they are read.

He is a poem and he is my master. I clutch his red, cracked spine to my breasts and hold him tight for a while. When I can bring myself to share him I will put him back where I found him under the shelves forgotten and eternally waiting for you.