In Which I am Likely to Blather at Length

I spend an awful lot of time thinking about how crappy the world is and how some dragons and maybe even a unicorn would spruce the place up. Less starvation and murdering and more "wheeeee I'm flying," or, "hey, look, it's an itty bitty scaly dwagon awww."

I think it all comes from individuals, me, in this case, having an enduring desire to somehow feel special, because then, you see, I will matter.

Aye, thar be the crux.

We all want to matter. We want our suffering and struggling to pay off. We want to buy our way into favor. We each believe certain stories about ourselves and we identify with them fiercely. Some of us even find our specialness by denying we buy into the idea of specialness in the first place.

But see, we're trying to validate our stories, not ourselves. What I am is what I am. It does not change due to some face I wear or what dance I perform or even what I think about myself.  People talk about defining themselves, but often that means sharpening their contrast against others.  And the distinction between me and you and a potted plant is getting pretty blurry. It's just a story.

I know I've been all broken record lately.  I think about this more often than just about anything else. Maybe I should be focusing on what does feel real and what does seem to matter instead of whining about a broken world and my own blindness. 

There is an echo of my brush with a grander reality underlying my insistance. I knew, recognized, felt timelessness. Words fail. And I wish very much to experience that again. Maybe only that.  Knowing what you are is joy.  Knowing there is no need to be afraid, ever is liberation. 

I want to know that I'm free, and I want to show others that they are too.

In Which I am Cheerful Due to the Ingestion of B Vitamins

For about a month now, I've lived with the Moma, worked with new folks and felt that I've done very, very little work, professionally and personally. I've also been pretty depressed off and on (not likely to be a coincidence).

I especially enjoy evenings sitting outside with my aunt, cousins and sometimes the Moma. Last night the fireflies came out, but so did bats. I have a fondness for bats--actually, I have a fondness for everything--but I was admittedly thrilled to watch them circling the backyard, clicking and narrowly avoiding each other. One of them grazed a gutter but was apparently unharmed.

There are, however, some down sides. Well, one downside. The neighbor on the north side of my mom's (my aunt lives on the south side) is a little bit of a... I don't really know how to describe him. He has a feud with my aunt's dude, and the only reason is that the guy (we call him the Bear in the Big Blue House because none of us remember his name) might be insane.

I think he must be pretty lonely and bored. He's been firing off fireworks, mostly bottle rockets and firecrackers every day, sometimes going on after 11 pm. His garage caught fire two weeks ago, and last week he started yelling across the yard. My mom was out tending to the ducks when she heard, "Hey, Norm!"

Bear was in the backyard. He'd taken down the privacy fence between his driveway and my mom's side yard, and could see through to my Aunt's, where my cousin's dude was doing yardwork. He yelled something to the effect of, "you just wait until tonight, I've got a surprise for you. I know people you don't."

This, of course, was rather upsetting to my aunt. Instead of the confrontation I was concerned about, his surprise was a letter scrawled in red ink, left in the middle of the night on the front door with duct tape. He wrote his address, but wrote "thouth" instead of south and "arirprot" instead of airport. The rest was reasonably spelled, strangely enough.

The letter was vaguely threatening, in that he insisted that he found Norm was a bad influence to the neighborhbood and that he was going to tell the landlord about the activities going on and pester the police ("pester" was written in the margin) until Norm was arrested or kicked out.

But so far, nothing. Keeping our fingers crossed. I am really quite patient, but harassing my family? No. Legal action will be taken if it has to be.

In Which Excessive Ruminations Produce Ponderings About Hell

Hell is the single most destructive concept to ever poison a mind.

The ultimate scare tactic, the concept of Hell demands inextricable beliefs that twist and warp our ideas about ourselves and our creator. We are traumatized to the point where many of us dare not question it, many refusing to even think about its ramifications.

If Hell exists, we cannot say that our creator is loving. If an all-powerful entity would even conceive of punishing or tormenting limited entities with limited perspectives for any reason, that entity lacks compassion and understanding. There is no justice in damnation.

From the idea of the existence of hell, we have spun a world where we face judgment from God, and in turn, from our society, our parents, and ourselves. We find ourselves scrabbling to make ourselves worthy, and so, find ourselves seeking validation from something outside of us. If we are approved of, we will not be cast out. From this mindset, we are powerless, subject to the whims of an untrustworthy creator who made us as we are, thrusting us into an unkind world, demanding that we feel, think or do only what is acceptable.

This is madness.

Yet we live this. We are conditioned to accept hierarchy, allowing someone else to have control of our daily activities, allowing ourselves to be subject to a system which demands we obey or be cast aside, having no intrinsic value as an entity. Why do we subjugate ourselves to this slavery? Some part of us subconsciously believes in a system of balances and entitlements. We are trying to buy our way into Heaven.

As a society, we feel that someone is more deserving of reward if they have suffered. We believe our pain earns us a place of value. There are plenty of people who make themselves out to be victims so they can feel deserving of peace, paying for their admission to Heaven/acceptance. What sort of God would demand such a thing? What could we give to an omnipotent being that it does not already have? What need would God have for our sacrifice?

So many of us are so deeply terrified of punishment that we dare not ask ourselves these fundamental questions! If God is omnipotent, omniscient, the ultimate and absolute, why would God demand anything from us? If God created us as we are, then God would have already had anything that would have been instilled into us. If God demands anything from us, it must be out of want or need, a lack that God wishes to be fulfilled. There is no reasoning to support this.

God cannot be loving if Hell exists. It is one or the other.

The scriptures of the Abrahamic religions do not depict God as a loving entity in any shape or form. Christianity offers the teachings of Christ, which are very much about forgiveness and love, yet the story has been recast into a tale of long-suffering and sacrifice to appease a bloodthirsty God. Jesus is offered as a means to salvation, a shield against the rage of the Divine.

This is deeper madness yet.

Perhaps it is the case that people are quite content to believe in a petty tyrant dictator as a creator. What does this make an individual being? An isolated flame that may be snuffed out at any moment, without value, a temporary flicker across the screen of the movie of the world? An entity which, if it suffers and kowtows and abides by arbitrary rules, can be exalted to the reaches of eternal peace and joy?

Or perhaps, Hell is a symptom of a yet more foundational belief, one which fuels the search for something greater than ourselves, one that stirs the undercurrent driving religions and philosophies and life itself.

We believe ourselves to be separate from each other, from our planet, our universe and whatever else we have yet to conceive of. We feel separate from our source, whatever that may be. And that is hell, for all of us. Strangely enough, in that, we are united. When we feel connected to someone or something else, it overrides whatever perceived surface definition and distinctions. Stripping away color and gender, religion and perspective, a moment of connection shows us what we are and what others are—the same. It may only be a step, but it is a step worth taking, a step worthy of any entity, be it infinite, eternal or mayfly ephemeral.

What this means for us is ever deeper than anything fear could inflict precisely because it erases fear. Through moments of clarity, we can see that fear does not show us reality but instead colors and twists it into something it is not. Hell is not reality. Separation cannot be reality either, even though it is what fear tells us about ourselves.  Without fear, we are joyous beings.

Our idea of Hell may be the only thing keeping us from Heaven.

In which I declare my intent to become a boomerang

In a little over a month, I, a nearly thirty (non-productive) writer, (barely productive) artist, (directionless) theorist, and (outstanding) provider of retail-based customer service, will be moving back in with my mother after about ten years more or less on my own.

Oh boy.

It came about because our (my partner's and my) lease will be up June first; he's moving to another town where he hopes to attend graduate school and I... well, I didn't want to go.

We've lived in Lansing, Michigan for almost two years. It's an all right place with an excellent mass transit system, an easily and safely navigable downtown, and some of the more awesome people I've been lucky enough to meet in my life. And as pleasant as it's been, I have not been focused on following any of the dreams I once had for myself. I say “once had” because I set them aside, by and large, due mostly to my belief that I “couldn't” do anything about them. Anything that's dependent on someone else just didn't seem at all feasible.

I've paralyzed myself when it comes to writing. Since I finished my Master's degree, I have written a bit—but before I started school, I filled between 15 and 20 pages a day, by hand, both sides of the page, absolutely absorbed. Maybe it just worked that way. That was the time when I could produce, produce, produce and now I can revise, revisit and rework. Note: that was well over ten years ago.

See, I have this story. Series of stories. Okay, I have nine book length stories of a fantasy and sci-fi series that spans several million years, a few planets and maybe even a cycle of creation in the grand scale of the universe. I might be on draft 25 of book one. I always intend for the newest draft to be the last one before I put it out there. I sent it to Tor once a few years ago and had a teeny bit of pride at having a real life rejection letter from a real life publisher.

The world is a different place for writers than it was ten years ago. I can self-publish on Amazon in e-book form. I can put up .pdf files for free for anyone who cares to read them. I can be read and judged and dismissed and maybe even liked. But, like everything else in my life, I've just felt like I “couldn't” write.

Just like I suddenly felt like I “couldn't” move, not again, for purposes having nothing to do with what I wanted. I love my partner, of course, and wish the absolute best for him. I hope he gets to do what he wants to do. I just... don't mind if I'm not a central part of it. I can't keep going at a pointless job, distracting myself with video games and Facebook and all the things I'm actually tired of on the Interwebs.

What can I do in six months? What can I do before 2013? And why is time such a huge factor in this for me?

I feel like I need to get sorted.

Telling my mother that we were moving, I expressed my reluctance and frustrations. “I just want to live on the futon in your living room.”

My mother responded, “We can do that.”

And one of those obligatory light switch “a-ha!” moments came.  I eased into it in discussion with my partner. “I might...” I started with, but made the decision final when he pressed me. He was looking for apartments, hoping to find one near a bus line because I (nearly thirty) never got a license. I refused to be a bother—my mother doesn't find me a bother, though she soon might—and made a definitive decision—the quickest I might have ever made.

I'm going home. I'll recuperate, I'll write, I'll save money from my pointless job, get a license, help my mother get a decent car, spend a wonderful summer with my beloved cousins, and eventually I will move somewhere I want to live and go to a school I want to go to instead of settle for or pass time in.

And hopefully, by the end of this year, I'll have a finished book on Amazon.