A dream - Jerral

I was sitting in a rocking chair in front of this gas station in Mt. Pleasant on the north side of town that we used to stop at on the way to Clint's.  I was rocking back and forth pretty good, thinking about these stunts I'd seen earlier that had put this idiot in the hospital.  It was a news report I was remembering.  It was funny, so I laughed.  Then I saw Sam coming up the hill, and I thought, "Time for a smoke," and started fumbling in my pocket for a couple of cigarettes.  Then to my left, I saw Jerral walking up.  He was just like the last time I saw him.  Stocky and healthy with a shock of unruly blond hair, arms so big they kind of stuck out to the side a little as they hung naturally from his shoulders, and there was this grin on his face that got bigger and bigger as he got closer.  I jumped up out of the chair in disbelief, and I said, "No, no, I knew it, you're ok, you're not dead," and I ran over and gave him a hug and started crying, saying into his shoulder, "Why, why man, why did you scare us like that?"  And then we sat down on a couch and he started to explain how he'd almost died, but it was his wife who had saved him, and then his voice started to recede and things started to fade, and I said out loud, "This isn't real.  You're dead."  And I burst into tears and woke up.

A dream - string of worlds

I dreamed I was on an engineered planet, one of a ring of planets which circled the sun, all of them connected by technology.  I stood on the surface of the world, and the sky was daylight and blue, but a very dark blue, and stars were visible, and the sun was shining close to the horizon, and it was indescribably beautiful.  And in the sky I could see the string of worlds, and they were all attached to this shimmering length and strung along it, and I could see the vegetation growing on each world, and the oceans churning and reflecting sunlight, and each was like a mini-version of the Earth.  A string of pearl Earth's stretching across the sky.  I got so excited I couldn't stand it, I had to find someone to show it to, and there was a station across the field, so I ran to it.  People came out, and I screamed and shouted to them and pointed at the sky, but wind was blowing, and I couldn't hear anything I said or they said.  I ran into the station, and the engineers were in there, the one's who'd created it all.  They were doing something that was being displayed on a screen, and I saw that they were tearing the string of worlds apart and reordering them, and in doing so, making connections which fit together perfectly, as if they'd been made that way but put together wrong to begin with.  I watched as all of the worlds reconnected, and electric lines of blue surged along all of the rivers and rock strata and ocean currents and air currents and through all of the vegetation, and then it was done, and it was all connected and I ran back outside and looked up, and it was all glowing this awesome blue, and I knew I was looking at a huge, cosmic brain which had been formed by all of those connections, and that the string of worlds was now a conscious thing.

Bird

The weirdest thing! Tonight I came across a bird in the road, just sitting there, all nestled up and comfy. Right in the middle of the road. So I went over to it and and said, "Hey bird, hey, hey, hey bird, hey, watcha doin' in the road, hey bird, whatcha doin', whatcha doin', get outa the road bird, hey bird, what's up bird?" And it didn't respond at all. Now, you may be thinking that this bird was dead, but no... I've seen plenty of dead birds. Just plenty of 'em, and this one wasn't dead. But what the heck WAS it doing? I reached down and was just about to grab it and move it off of the road, and as soon as the tip of my finger just barely touched its wing, SHEBLOGINSCHNOGUMUP! That bird flew right off. Crazy bird. Could'a got run over.

Dang. I mean, yeesh. Wow! Weird!

Dang. I mean, yeesh. Wow! Weird! Okay, so here's what happened. I was walking along, and about to cross over a creek. It was a pretty wild creek, with lots of reeds and tall grass growing in it. So, I'm walking across this man-made Road Bridge, over the creek, and I see this thing moving in it. This thing moving in the creek. At the front of it, where its mouth probably was, there were a bunch of reeds and grass sticking up out of the water. It had these things in its mouth, these tall pieces of grass and stuff. So, I pretty much stopped immediately and froze, and looked at it really hard. I thought to myself, dang, what the fuck is this? A fucking platypus or something? Pardon my language, but that's what I was thinking and what I kind of said out loud, in a sort of whisper. I watched it and it kept coming toward me, and I had the ridiculous thought that it was a cartoon animal, swimming along underwater, and using a hollow reed for a snorkel. I happened to be munching on a pretzel at that moment, so I spit it out into my hand and threw it into the creek. I thought to myself, damn, that'll stop that thing. I was sure that it would go after the pretzels. But hell no, that thing just kept on swimming, with the shittiest bouquet in the world, sticking out of the water in front of it. As it was about to pass under the little piece of road I was standing on, I threw more pretzels at it, and I even yelled at it. I think that I said, "Yo yo yo, hey, pretzels! You're missing the pretzels! Dummy! Wtf?" Then I got a closer look at it, and I thought that it was either a beaver, or an armadillo. Or a platypus. or a really hairy turtle. Heck, I don't know what it was, but whatever it was, it was on a mission with that bouquet of weeds.

How we met

How We Met
by
Ash

One day I was cleaning my dust collection when I suddenly had the urge to do something impossible. So, I decided to put this quantum mechanics probability poo-poo and purgatory of uncertainty crap, espoused by such mental midgets as Bohr, Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg, to the test.

So, using that crazy 'observation must make it real' crap that Schrodinger was trying to teach to his cat as a necessary reference point in this world of bullcrap, I observed a device into existence for the purpose of punishing all of this dumbass quantum mechanical rigmorole. Seriously, it's retarded. I mean... if we are to believe the ass menagerie of modern science, then quarks come in flavors. So, according to these aforementioned dunderheads, there is such a thing as a quark that tastes like 'charmed'. And some of them have to spin 720° just to make one full rotation... I shit you not! Now, does that make a doggone bit of sense? NO. Quarks are stupid.

So. The device I observed into existence was a protractor which could not only measure both the energy and position of a particle simultaneously, but which also shat upon Planck's constant and the Pauli exclusion thing and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, all at the same time (it was a real protractor, by the way, and not just some crazy imaginary thing... just so you know I'm not making this up) which means that according to this protractor, Heisenberg was stoned and Pauli must have been drunk on elderberry wine, and Planck was just this kid who thought algebra was a vegetable.

So, now that I've laid the groundwork, we can continue on to whatever it was I was talking about, which was how we met... I guess. That's the title I used when I saved this little essay when I started writing it about a week ago, but now I can't remember who it was that I was supposed to have met, and how it was supposed to have happened. It's pretty frustrating. Like when there's something you can't remember the name of.. like a thingamajig, or a whatchamacallit. Or that dream you had last night, or what day it is, or where you are, or how to speak English, or how to breathe... uh. You get the gist.

Anywho, that's what's happening right now. I can't remember any of that stuff. That's ok though, because I don't remember meeting anyone before, ever. I know it's something that must have or will have happened at some time in the future or as a future memory, but that I will have had knowledge of before I start writing this; the knowledge of which has, or was, or will have, or will be, or will be said or will have been said at some point either then, now or whenever, and has become or will become or is becoming or later becomes whatever it is that this is, right now.

Does anyone concur?

Oh, wait a second! I remember now. All of this was supposed to be about how I met this 120 year old time traveling version of myself from the future, who'd been on all these awesome adventures with aliens and dinosaurs. Duh! How could I have forgotten that? Stupid!

That Feeling

Sometimes I dream about that place where reality consists of an abstract feeling tthat describes things, such as family and friends and home and weather and seasons and love and happiness and disappointment and sadness and despair and hope and longing and utter destruction. Don't we all have those dreams? The ones that seem more real than actually being awake... the ones that we long for, that should contain us forever in a shroud of comfort, immune to logic and math, and events and the passage of time? The ones which consist of that pinnacle of perfect sadness that we would die for? A comforting blanket of grief that lasts forever. Murky and warm and deadening, like an eternal dose of novocaine. Does anyone else know about this, or is it just me?

How I turned a million in real estate into 25 dollars cash

It's about... 2:00 am, and I'm just leaving CVS. I have some crap that I need to throw away, so I head for the trash, over there to the right, and... good grief, it's practically overflowing. Doesn't anyone here ever empty the trash on their smoke breaks? Unacceptable.

Anywho. So I walk over to this volatile midden heap to dispose of my receipt and some other crap. I toss it all in, oblivious to the danger... but as I turn to leave, I have to do a double take. What did I just see in there? In the trash? Was that money? I shoved my flashlight in there and shone it around, and by golly, there was a dollar bill! I wasted no time extricating it from the surrounding crap, after which I continued to excavate vigorously with both hands.

As I was thusly engaged, I looked over to my left and froze. There sat a cop in his cop car, about ten feet away, just a-watching me as I enthusiastically strip mined the garbage. Without really being consciously aware of it, I immediately... bounced, I guess, is the best word to describe it... away from the garbage can, as if I had been shocked right off of it with high voltage. I looked around for a strategic exit, but the cop was parked right there at the curb. There was nothing for it except to just walk right on past, holding up that dollar bill and sort of smiling and wiping the invisible schmutz off it, hoping that the cop understood that it was okay, and not at all retarded, or illegal, to go dumpster diving for dollar bills.

Alone and stuck in a bear trap with a bad banana on broadway

Why does it feel this way?

I do this walking around at night thing a lot, and every single time I do it, I'm alone - an isolated thing; a self contained window on the universe. So I ask myself for the umpteenth time - is everyone alone inside themselves, or is it just me? It's how I've felt for my entire life, since I was old enough to remember being alive. It feels natural... this cut-off, isolated feeling. The way cancer feels natural. That's the way I've always thought of it.

Allow me to elucidate. Firstly, we have selfish to the second power - that is, the object of our discussion - multiplied by selfish. Or selfish squared, or the opposite of the square root of selfish. Anyway. Then you multiply all of that crap by altruism, and then divide it all by patience. Then, after all that, the only thing left is to plug in the value of the specific triomial nomenclature pertaining to whatever it was that the poem was about, which is, in this case... the deus ex machina, and you wind up with what seems like a lot of pretentious bullshit. Ha ha ha! But seriously though. Right? Yeah! Hee hee hee. So. Yeah. But seriously. Right? Will you go with me? Yes - No - circle one?

So anywho.

Here I am, and it feels to me like life is an immense bear trap; the dimensions of which aren't measured in space, but in duration... always only a day or two away from its purpose, which happens to be adjacent to, parallel to, perpendicular to, and opposite of mine.

A big dumb truck and a stupid fraidy cat monster

I'm walking down Windsor, going east past the rec center.  There is some kind of waste management truck, driving on the sidewalk, of all places.  There are little mini-manholes along the sidewalk every now and then, which I assume are accessible for some civil engineering purpose, so I guess that truck is doing the mini man-hole thing at 4:00 am. I don't like it - he's in my way.  I have to cross the street and tread on grass to avoid the truck, which displeases me.  It is an inconvenience.  I pass by the truck as it inches forward, and think to myself... supid truck, don't you know that at night, all of this belongs to me?  Yeesh.

Anyway, so I keep walking and finally pass that truck and I am able to regain my rightful place on the sidewalk.  You hear that, truck?  Roads are for trucks, like the one two feet to your right that you can't seem to get a bead on.  And sidewalks are for people.  You know, the guys who invented your stupid self with your too big to be practical tires and your huge storage tank full of whatever and your big, dumb empty brain case that requires somebody to be sitting inside it just so you can decide whether or not you need to take a dump.

Okay, that made no sense, which I now realize.  Whatever.  Who cares.

Now comes the point of all this rambling rigmarole.  So I pass by that big, dumb brainless truck, and after about half a mile of blessed silence and peace, here comes this wolf, just trotting along in the opposite direction on the other side of the road, as if he had every right to.  Wait just a second... was that a wolf?  Let's see.. it definitely wasn't a coyote, because I've seen plenty of those late at night, roaming the streets of Denton.  City coyotes, I guess they are, like in those old cartoons where the city varmint visits the country varmint and hilarity ensues.  You know, city coyotes.  Like these ones; that is, if there were any here.

Anywho, this weren't no coyote, because coyotes are little scraps of fur and bones, and this thing was huge.  Way bigger.  I suppose it could have been a German Shepard, but how many huge, stray German Shepards do you see wandering the country part of Denton at 4:00 am?  It was big, and I think it was a wolf.  Right?  Ok then, it's decided.  It was a wolf.

So this huge wolf monster goes trotting by, and I have no choice but to ready my double-laser club-whip and prepare for battle.  The wolf monster turns its head toward me in mid-stride, and as he sees me, his eyes instantly ignite into two glowing blue balls of super hot plasma, and I mentally prepare myself for the twin beams of million degree energy which will instantly render my atoms into their constituent quarks, thereby returning me to the quagma state; that frothing stew of potential from which all matter is formed and all phenomena occur.

Well, that didn't happen obviously, because that wolf just kept on going and hightailed it like a big stupid fraidy cat.  Stupid fraidy cat wolf monster.

Anywho.

Killed by beauty

I, as a pinpoint of awareness in all of this infinite shmagaluphness, am walking at night with the whole of existence all around me, in every direction, everywhere.  It's night, or what I observe as night.  I am this thing which absorbs the ceaseless input of information from just... everything, is all.  I direct my sight up, and see a thing which astounds me.  Just flat out blows me away.  It always does, I guess.  Clouds are forming a bright fish-bone type of pattern against a darker background of sky... and the reason is - get this - because of the moon, which is half full.  It's over to the left of where I'm looking; where I'm directing my information absorbing attention, for those brief moments of eternity.  The clouds are a kind of gray-blue color, against another gray-blue color.  The sky.  Which is about, oh say... a hundred times darker than the clouds.  Wild guess.  They show up pretty well against it.  The moon is there, about a thousand times brighter than the clouds.  Half of it.  The moon.  Half of the moon, as it's only half full.  And there's this thing around it, a band of dim colors that fade into the background of sky, because of quadzillions of atoms what are scattering the light just so... red and blue and purple, and purple-black, and red-black, and blue-silver, and just so many colors.  I never have noticed before that so many colors can exist between gray blue black and white blue light.  I never knew that before. 

I continue walking, and the stuff around me continues to change as my position changes.  All kinds of stuff.  Lit by moon-light and man-light.  Trees, branches, leaves, man-made stuff, dirt, puddles of water, reflections of trees and branches and leaves and man-made stuff and dirt in the puddles of water.  For a few moments I wonder about the resolution of the universe, and how far down it goes, and how much processing power it takes to continue rendering it into existence, and then I imagine the mind of God, or try to... the mind of God, constantly rendering the universe into existence, and I am afraid, deeply afraid that I'm incapable of ever understanding, and that I'll be afraid for a brief piece of eternity.

Awareness continues and changes as the scenery changes, and the mood changes too, and I understand for a second... I am aware of how it's all attacking me from everywhere at once, all of this beauty, and that it's relentless, and without mercy.  It will never stop being beautiful, and my only defense is to ignore it, which is impossible.  I am being battered with beauty, and I start to cry, and to weep, and tears pour out of my eye holes, but I try to do it silently so as to not contaminate or offend or anger all of that everythingness around me.  I try to weep with a tiny bit of humility, but I know I'm not.  I know that I'm only weeping for myself, and because of my fear, but I don't know how else to be.  I don't know how to weep purely. 

I endure this kind of strange mixture of heaven and hell for as long as it takes for me to realize that this beauty is terminal.  It's killing me.  I'm being constantly killed by beauty, and I don't know if I'm crying with tears of joy or tears of sadness.  I don't know whether to be comforted or terrified.  I truly don't know.  I'm just overwhelmingly overcome with this thing, a feeling or something.  This thing that invades my now-ness and forces my acknowledgement of it.  I'm suddenly aware that I'm alive, so very much alive.  Ah, God.  I don't know.  I don't know what sadness is or happiness is.  I don't know.  I'm feeling very very much, and I don't know.  I'm aware of dying.  That I'm living, and that every moment of living is dying.  That the point of living is dying, and that the reason to live is to die.  To be killed by the experience of life; the beauty of it.  Beauty is killing me, and it always has been, and I only notice it now and then.  It's too much.

Life is but a dream

Sometimes when it's late and it's dark and I'm out walking, and when there are trees... especially when there are trees, I get an almost indescribable feeling of nostalgia for a youth which consists only of insubstantial experiences - as if I've slept through my entire childhood, and all of my memories from that time are just the memories of dreams.

These dreams that I remember consist of summer evening sunlight shining through the tree branches of a particularly dense copse of woodsy pines, leaving dappled shadows on the loamy, needle strewn ground. Always in these dream memories there is a feeling of ignorant, naive comfort. It's a reflection of a child's mindset - my mindset as a child.

When I was about 4 years old, my granddaddy built a fort of tree branches for me and my brother in the woods behind our trailer and called it Kalamazoo. The details of this memory are more like a smudge of the senses than an accurate record of events, so what I'm left with is more of a feeling than an actual play by play of these particular moments which transpired when I was all of four years old. 

These memories are well on their way to becoming nothing more than the remembrance of dreams.  Row, row, row your boat.

God's Own Fingernail

As I was walking back to my sisters house tonight, I followed the moon.  It is almost a perfect half moon tonight, casting just enough light every now and then to lend a dream-like quality to the moment, when it happened to be just right.  I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing - the experience I have every now and then when I'm out late at night and walking, when a few elements of thought and observation line up just-so that they twist reality into more of an abstract feeling, rather than this physical matrix in which I normally perceive myself as imbedded within.  These moments occur and I always experience them with a part of myself which is detached.  I don't know what it's detached from... just that it's detached, and not part of the majority for a little while.  For a few moments.  And sometimes this scares the ever loving crap out of me.

There's no such thing as a moment, by the way.  I'm certain that I'm not the first somebody to realize this, but it still seems kind of profound to me, that the thought coursed through my brain and stimulated my awareness.  Kind of like... say, the way a retarded, malformed appendix cell languishing amongst a culture of Isle of Langerhans, with a virus clinging to its nucleus and inserting alien RNA into its genome, causing it to digest its own mitochondria, may realize at some level resembling a few bits of information, that this situation is certainly unique to its existence which, up to that point, might have otherwise been fairly normal... that is, if it had been a regular, non-retarded appendix cell, existing in an appendix, doing whatever it is that appendix cells are supposed to do, as they occupy a series of connected moments, with one moving seamlessly into the next.  Except that there aren't any individual moments.  There is only the one long moment of the present, inside which we are all trapped and imprisoned and enslaved, like a gear in a machine... a gear which has to have THIS many teeth, and which has to interface specifically with THAT gear, and which must turn at a CERTAIN speed, so that its momentum can be transferred to the NEXT MOMENT... so that existence can continue to be.  So we divide up life into little segments called moments, which don't even exist.  It's exactly like pointing to an empty field and saying, "Hey, check out that fire breathing, 20 thousand ton mayfly dancing on the head of that tiny shard of degenerate matter, defecating rainbows and singing a different kind of math."  It's exactly like that.

So, like I was saying.  I was walking back to my sisters house tonight, following the moon.  And while I was doing this, walking along and looking at the moon, marveling at the pure fact that it was right there, shining this silver white light down onto the ground, onto a field of grass which fairly glowed with this blue-green sheen... as if the very atoms which comprised its being were each individually painted over with a physical manifestation of the ether through which dreams flow... anyway, so while I was doing this, the walking and looking thing, with the moon and the grass and all, I suddenly realized something.  I had an epiphany, if you will.  A grand moment of clarity.  That the moon, in its waning gibbous state, was God's Own Fingernail, hovering up there, right in front of me, right at that moment.  And that since there is no ONE single moment, that must mean that it (God's Own Fingernail, that is) is always there, has always been there, will always be there, and won't ever not be there.  God's Own Fingernail, that is.  And then I kind of got scared shitless and hurried up and got here so I could type up this absurdity, rendering the abstract thought of the insane into a few harmless, logical words which fairly obeyed the rules of grammar.

Yeah, I guess that kinda sums me up, if I lived in fantasyland.

You Are A:

Neutral Good Human Cleric (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength- 11
Dexterity- 12
Constitution- 13
Intelligence- 11
Wisdom- 13
Charisma- 12
Alignment:
Neutral Good- A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Clerics- Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

The 'Oh Crap' Effect

A few minutes ago as I was walking south on Bonnie Brae, I had just passed the new electrical substation when a coyote ran across the road in front of me. I immediately whipped up my flashlight and followed it as it crossed. It was looking at me the whole time it was running, and it's eyes glowed blue.

Once on the other side of the road, it disappeared into the underbrush, and I thought that I had lost it. I poked around in the bracken from a distance with the flashlight beam for a while, using it as an appendage to stir up the detritus and to sweep away the shadows. As I approached the copse where the coyote had disappeared, sweeping my light back and forth, I briefly illuminated a pair of bright blue pinpricks. I quickly swept the beam back again, but before I could completely change direction, another pair of disembodied sparks was revealed floating in the darkness... and then another, and another, and another, one right after the other, as if a stage-hand was illuminating them on cue for maximum dramatic effect.

In all, four pairs of eyes regarded me from the bushes. None of them moved for the entire time I had them in my flashlight beam, which was for at least thirty seconds, and nary a sound was emitted. Then I realized that four coyotes could probably have me for dinner, so I high tailed it.

A friend of mine, after reading this, referred to my experience as the 'Oh Crap' effect:

"You find something that seems pretty cool or cute, and you think, 'Oh how cute' or 'Oh how cool'.  Then your brain kicks you mentally in your face going, "Hey you stupid muppet, this is dangerous."  Only then does it dawn on you, that feeling of  Oh crap..." 

Although I think that in order to get the full 'Oh Crap...' effect, you need to crap your pants too.

Help my sister Michele win VIP tickets to see Heart! Pretty Please :)

My sister, Michele, who is the biggest Heart fan ever to exist in all of the UNIVERSE, is entered into a contest to win VIP concert tickets to see them! And not only that, but if she wins, she would actually get to MEET THEM! And on top of THAT, she'd receive an autographed guitar!

So please, please, PRETTY PLEASE help my sister! To vote, all you have to do is click on the link. That's it!! The website keeps a tally and right now she's in 11th place!!

This is for my sister, Michelle, whom I love very much! Please help make this most wonderfulest and awesomest and spectacularest thing happen for her! Thanks so very very much!

Go Michele!!!!

(clicky clicky the linky linky, right there underneathy neathy!)

This link is, in fact, a virtual naked singularity, and is inexorably pulling your mouse to it, spaghettifying it in the process, and crunching the signals sent from your mouse clicks into an infinitely dense mass of clickified cyperspacetime!

A dream - back together

This dream-city was divided up into districts.  Some were nice, some were so-so, some were slums, and some were just death zones.  I needed to get into the death zone for some reason, and I had met this girl, this really cute, young wisp of a girl, and we were trying to figure out how to get into the death zone district.  We made our way over to it, and I opened the gate.  From inside we could hear guns and shouts and all kinds of violent noise.  I had heard that the life expectancy of anyone just walking straight into this district was less than a minute.  The girl and I looked at each other, and she said that we could either go right in and most likely get killed immediately, or she could go in the back way through this drainage pipe that she knew of and come get me once she'd cleared a path.  That way made more sense, so before she left, I embraced her very closely and we just held each other like that for a long time, wondering if we'd see each other again.  I was thinking to myself, "Do I really care for this girl in this way, or am I just being selfish by trying to, and making myself feel this way?"  Then we separated and she was gone.

Then I was wandering the streets with this piece of poster board, and attached to it in rows were these little bags of screws and nails.  I was trying to get back to my own district to do something important with all of it, and on the way I dropped it as I was crossing a street and the wind blew it several feet away from me.  I ran back for it, and I passed somebody who remarked that I looked like I was in a real hurry, and not to be so hurried that I make some kind of mistake, and he referred to this news item from several years ago, in which these archeologists ruined this expensive dig by trying to speed through it.  He asked me if I remembered which dig he was talking about.  I thought about it, and was about to say King Tut, but then I remembered that it wasn't a ruined dig, it was a curse or something.  Then I remembered, it was this dig in Iraq back in 2003, and they were trying to bring this broken piece of a statue back to the surface, this statue leg, and in their haste had destroyed it.  I called to the guy, who was walking away, and said, "It was this statue leg, right?  Some kind of leg they were digging up in Iraq?"  He stopped and looked back at me.  "You got it!" he said, surprised and smiling, and he walked away.

I turned my attention back to the poster board and screws, and began picking up the little baggies, which had become detached.  They were all dirty, and the poster board had folded over and dirt had gotten into the crease.  I spent a fair amount of time gathering it all up and cussing and just being irritated, and a car pulled up and stopped on the other side of the street.  I didn't look up, but then I noticed somebody standing over me, very close to me.  I stopped what I was doing and looked up, and it was Leah.  She was smiling down at me.  I just continued to look up at her, stunned and immobile.  She knelt down and gave me a kiss and said, "I couldn't stay away.  I tried, for a long time I tried.  I tried, and I couldn't.  I just couldn't." And then she embraced me.  I couldn't believe it.  Here she was, and I couldn't believe it.  A surge of happiness washed through me, and then the dream began to fade, and as it did, I thought about the other girl I'd just met, and I hoped she wouldn't be hurt, that she hadn't begun to develop feelings for me.

And then when the dream re-formed, Leah and I and my sister Cheyenne and my brother Matt were all at Leah's apartment.  I was sitting at her table, and she was milling around, picking up dishes and whatnot, just straightening up some.  She was explaining to me how she had finally come to the decision that she couldn't stay away anymore, and that she didn't care about all of the problems and reasons for why she left in the first place, and that she was tired of Nick's shenanigans, and that she realized that she loved me, that it was like a thunderbolt when the truth of it hit, that she'd loved me all along and that everything had been a distraction to keep that knowledge from her.  She came around and sat across the table from me and pulled my hands onto the table and held them there, with our arms lying on the table, sitting across from each other.  She looked directly into my eyes and said, "We need to talk to Fr. Justin about this.  About where we left off."  I looked at my sister, and then at my brother, and they were both smiling, and I thought, I can't believe this.  I can't believe it, I just can't believe it, and I began to smile, and my heart began to soar, and I got up and Leah got up, and we held each other and I kissed her, and then held her close, and I began crying into her hair, getting her hair wet with my tears.  She started crying too, and she said, "Why is it that we cry when we're so happy?"  I thought about it and realized that joy and pain came from the same place, deep in your heart, and I looked into my heart right then, as I was holding Leah and crying tears of joy, and saw how similar the two feelings were.  How the joy in my heart I was feeling right then actually hurt a little.  How it was rubbing up against all kinds of damage and scarring and wounded places in my heart, like when you irritated a wound before it's fully healed by bumping it against something, but that it felt good instead of bad... but it still hurt.  I tried to express this to Leah as I held her, but my voice cracked and I was choked up, and I couldn't get any coherent words out right then because my nose was stopped up from crying and I had swallowed a bunch of tears and I had to clear my throat first, but then I didn't care about saying anything anymore.  So I just remained like I was instead, holding her close, feeling her arms around me and her chin on my shoulder and our heads touching and our hair mingling, holding her so close that I could touch my elbows, and thinking that it was the happiest moment of my life.

Hurts

What is it about pain that makes me want to share it?  Why would I want to burden anyone else with the awfulness?  I never understood that there was so much pain available.  I guess I thought it was for everybody else, and not me.  I've thought that I've been in pain before, sure.  It hurts all the time, just being alive, and the years add up.  I guess you can get used to anything though.  But who can get used to an artillery barrage?  That's what it feels like now, all the time.

Jerral is dead.  How can that be?  All I had to do was just say one word to him, just one word, and he'd still be alive.  One word.  Any word.  He'd still be alive.  I wasn't there when he needed to live.  Everybody tells me that it's not my fault, I can't blame myself.  Oh yes I can, because this isn't just any situation.  I knew Jerral.  I KNOW that if I'd just called him once he'd be alive right now.  It would have set a different sequence of events into motion, and he wouldn't be dead.  I wouldn't have let him die.

My brother... I'm so tired.  I can't.  There's too much grief, and it costs too much.  I don't have the energy to feed this pain continuously, and still breathe and eat and go to work and sleep and walk and look at things and hear and smell and live and type this.  I'll never have another conversation with my brother again.  My relationship with him is diminished.  My life is diminished.  The last coherent words we exchanged were words filled with anger.  I have nightmares about my brother every night now, that he's dying the saddest death imaginable.  I wake up boo-hooing and getting my pillow all messy, and my ears all plugged up, and that's the worst time to feel sad, is right after you wake up from a dream.  All of my dreams are linked together by an unbroken sadness now.

And Leah.  If ever there was a dead horse that just kept getting beat over and over and over again, it's this heartache bullshit.  I'm so sick of being heartsick.  Fuck this, I hate it.  It's a part of the new pain conglomeration now... Leah, Jerral and Matt.  I feel like crying all the time now, all the time I'm holding back tears.  If I let my mind indulge in any kind of memory or thought concerning these people I love and whom I've lost, then the tears start and I have to spend a hundred calories trying to suppress them, and that sucks.

How did this happen?  I thought it used to hurt.  What an idiot I am.  Now I know that it can keep hurting worse and worse and worse, and that there will always be a new level of pain to explore.  It all sucks now.  It hurts,

I think I'm gonna throw up now. Isn't that funny?

I think I figured out something about art tonight. I was walking home from work and listening to some music that I really love - a band called Pinback - and as I was listening, I saw my shadow marching before me, in step with the song. It's a dark no-moon night, so the available light was coming mostly from street lamps. The lights which were casting my shadow were about 100 yards behind me, and at the top of a hill. I was in this little valley with trees all around, and my shadow was long and surreal... like a caricature of me.

I began to feel separated from my shadow, as if I wasn't associated with it, but just watching it perform this marching step in time with the music, a rigid step-dance, independent from me. I saw it as this black description of an animated piece of negative space, forever marching away from me. Purposefully moving away from me, trying to get away from me, to disassociate itself from me.

And that's when I realized what art really is. It's an expression of everything, represented as a caricature of the artist, but separated from the artist on a thousand superficial levels. If we just look at it and then look away, then we only see the most shallow part, the just under the surface information which is meant to lead into the heart of the artist, but only gives vague directions. This is the view that most of us perceive when someone presents us with a thing that they want us to appreciate. Usually we just glance at it, or listen to a few seconds of it with half an ear, and say, "Cool," when what we actually mean is, "I really don't give a shit because it isn't about me. Now, have I got something to show you..."

So that's art in a nutshell. Just a method for trying to get people to understand that thing about ourselves that even we don't understand. The problem with it is, most of us are so self absorbed that we never recognize what's being said. We want you to look at us, but we don't want to look at you. But then again, what makes art a 'thing' to begin with is that shared connection among people who understand a particular something. The concept exists as a phenomenon - but independent of logic.

Isn't that funny?

Things that happened recently

From April until now:  The sister of a friend of mine from East Texas committed suicide.  The father of a friend of mine in East Texas died.  My Aunt Mary Lou passed away.  My Aunt Judy died during routine back surgery.  My best friend from East Texas killed himself.

The dressing on all of that death salad is that my brother Matt had a stroke about a month ago.  His cognitive ability is diminished, as well as his speech.  He can't work anymore.  It's impossible for us to have a normal conversation now.  Nobody knows yet how much he will recover... he may never recover.  He'll probably get disability.

I'll never have another argument with my brother again.  Ever.

What can I say?  It all makes me very sad.

My friend Jerral

I learned this weekend that my dear friend, my dearest friend and brother in all but blood, my friend, my friend... my connection to mortality, my secret sibling - Jerral Wayne Johnson - committed suicide. I love you brother, I'm sorry it had to hurt so bad, I'm sorry I wasn't there. I love you Jerral, I love you, I miss you, I'm sorry, forgive me.

Jerral is the only friend I've ever had who I actually thought of as my brother.  We even wrote and signed a contract - making us brothers - with our own blood, and shook bloody hands over it.  Yeah.  We really did that.  And I honored that pact by completely ignoring it.

The last time I saw or spoke to Jerral we had been drinking and we had fought pretty severely.  I know Jerral - I know that he was a tortured soul; that he always was his own worst enemy, and that alcohol brought out his demons.  I know that he felt terrible about what happened between us, and that he was sorry.  I know that he agonized over the memories of our last encounter and endured extreme guilt because of it.  I know he was sorry... I know all of this; I knew all of this, but  I never contacted him again or told him how sorry I was, or asked his forgiveness, or gave him my own forgiveness.  I just left him there, mired in his own feelings of self hatred, and I never even tried to heal that breach between us.  I never even tried.

Never have I ever felt like this before.  Ever.  I can't help but think... if I'd contacted him, if I'd made some kind of effort to talk to him again, that he'd still be alive now.  But I never suspected... I never imagined... I never thought in a million years that he'd take his own life.  I was always sure there would be time to get together with him again.  I always assumed that I'd see him again, and that we'd talk about that fight we had when we last saw each other, and that we'd laugh about it and call each other idiots while remembering how drunk and stupid we had been at the time.

But that never happened... so here it is, continually before me... a moment which will always contain the death of my friend.  And there I am, forced to observe this truth as it just sits there... still and unchanging.  And somehow this never ending moment, this persistence of NOW, this terrible, happened thing, this moment which contains within it the first real description of suicide that I've actually known - all other descriptions before this one were in black and white and projected onto a broken wooden fence in broad daylight - all of this truth containing moment exists solely as a construction of the most terrible thing I've ever experienced in my life.  And there it is, continually before me, and here I am... forced to observe its persistence.

It's interesting, in a clinical, detached way... a new emotion, something new to feel.  A brand spanking new experience.  Interesting.

I'm afraid

I want to say things, out loud to people, but it's like a brick wall stops me.  No, a neutronium wall, which stops me.  Secrets that I hate about myself.  A lot of the things I hate about myself aren't 'me', but things 'about' me.  Does that make sense?  I don't hate myself, not really.  I have enough true self awareness to realize that I'm not inherently evil, because I recognize the evil in myself and hate that instead.  But, it's still something which is attached to me, and it's easy to confuse it with myself.

I think there's a core to my self which is separate from evil, but is addicted to it.  When I say EVIL, I don't mean bloody fangs and murderous rage and hatred for him and her and them.  I mean... things about me which I hate.  Simple evil.  Evil that's not necessarily recognizable.  The worst kind, I guess.  Heck, I don't know.  Personal evil.  The kind that hurts only the people around me that I love, as opposed to the kind that would make me famous, like Hitler evil.  Anyway.  That kind of evil... the worst, I suppose... for me anyway.  That's the kind which is attached to me, which I can't shake off.  And I hate it, like it hates me.  It's a working relationship.  I never knew about it, not really, until about four and a third years ago.  It's good to know it's there, though.  If evil can make me feel good at all, then that good feeling comes from recognizing it, because if you can't recognize despair, then you'll never know hope.

For most of my life I've been just one little teeny tiny soul out of a gadzillion which have lived and died and are living right now... just one, but my own life has seemed so all encompassing.  How can it not have?  I'm a self contained observation of the universe.  How can I ever ever understand anything or anyone other than myself?  How can I ever connect to the real existence of life, and understand that my own personal conscious awareness isn't just this little, compressed singularity of despair?  If I ever ever understand that, then I think I'll understand that the despair I feel never existed, because I'm not alone.  Right?  Whoever you are, if you are reading this, is reading this.  Therefore, I'm not alone.  You've felt this way, right?  Or have you?  How can you not have?  Maybe it's my ego trying to assert itself again, wishing that I'm not the only one to be terrified.  But if you add up all the terrified souls, surely it's got to come out to a positive number.  It's math, right?  Somewhere in there?

Last night, I went to sleep, trying to imagine the trees of that dream.  I've mentioned it before, here and there, to people and online and whatnot.  That dream, up in the trees, where I could spend eternity.  That feeling I get, when I think about that dream I had, 10 years ago, of just existing up there, in the dark, in the trees, changeless and absurd in it's apathetic attractiveness.  I awoke 30 minutes later.  I was breathing, really hard.  Fast.  Breathing about 5 times a second, over and over, in a terrified panic.  I was terrified, trapped in between awake and asleep for what seemed a timeless period, but which had to have been less than 30 minutes at least.  I awoke, breathing like that, feeling like I was about to die, terrified out of my mind, like I was about to die, saying out loud:

"I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid."

I woke myself up saying that.  I thought my mom was there, and that she was holding me, but it was my pillow... I thought it was my mom for a while though.  That's what brought me out of it.  It was terrible.  Just absolutely terrible.  Hateful.  It was hell, for a little while.

I don't know where I'm going with this rambling monologue, changing subjects and stuff.  Just saying it I guess, so that it's not still just in my head.  Getting it out, so I won't have it in me and feel so alone with it and be so scared of it.  That's all, I suppose.  I'ma sleep now.

Three Years

Three years and two weeks and I still think about her every day, I still feel her lack of presence like a phantom limb, and I'm still a retarded goof ball in love.  It'll be interesting to see how long this keeps up.  In other news, I completely forgot about the Jazz Fest this weekend.  That sure was a fun time at the Jazz Fest back in 2009, when we she and I and my sister and John all went together.  That was fun.  I miss her.  Really a bunch.  A whole lot... dang.  Awww man, I just realized I might be stuck with these feelings for the rest of my life.

A single breath

A single breath, one little smell, and I've relived a lifetimes worth of youth in a few seconds.

Something about the night. When it's quiet, and still, and the moon reveals something, a form with a silvery blue lining... the edge of that something reveals a distinct lack of substance. A pure blackness, an anti-tree which, through the trick of not even existing at all, brutally cuts the sky to pieces. Something about it is very compelling. The shape of the wounded sky; the presence of a chaotic, fractal nothing, implies a suggestion. I think about it for a while, off and on, and at the end of the night, after I'm back home and safely tucked into bed, I get it. Eternal sadness? An intentional thing, purposeful and created? That's it. And by qualifying the suggestion, I've just given it form. The sudden realization of the reality of this universal practical joke - played on suckers like me by the devil, apparently - to which I'd just supplied the punchline, threatens to overwhelm me.

After a while I've had enough of that piece of tree-shaped hole in the sky. I start walking again, into the wind, and the breath of the world shoots up my nose. The world does little things like this to me sometimes, usually without warning. I'll never understand it. The smell of the beautiful sadness of memory tries to carry me away into a comfortable oblivion. With some effort, and somewhat reluctantly, I turn away from this feeling, and it feels like I've amputated a part of myself. It hurts terribly for a moment, and then, suddenly and without even meaning to, I put myself back together and I can't even remember feeling anything at all. Sometimes I really worry about the absurdity of everything.

I finally decide to do something about the splinter in my right foot that has been worrying away at me all day, just sitting there at the limit of perception, wreaking havoc somewhere down there just above the cellular level. I realize that it's just a tiny piece of whatnot, and that it's state of awareness - if it even has any at all - lies somewhere between that of a grain of sand and the thermostat on the air conditioner. However, even as stupidly unaware as it might be, it's still a guilty little freeloading bastard that's been getting a free ride all day, and I've passed judgement on it and sentenced it to the same oblivion from which I'd just recently emerged. After the sentence is carried out and it's over and done with, I don't feel bad about it at all... well, maybe a little. As simple as it was, it was a thing with a purpose - to aggravate the heck out of me - and it was fulfilling that purpose completely. I ended that brief purpose, forever. Empathy for a splinter. Isn't that retarded?

It's late. I'm home. I'm tired. I've been running a fever all night.

I'm sad. I'm afraid. I don't belong.

I'm alone.

Everything is going to be all right.

Hilarity

Uh... it's late, or early, or whatever.  Drank too much tonight, still awake, and I missed vigil too because I decided to party with my brother.  I missed confession too, so I've excommunicated myself from communion.  It's Lent, and I'm just using it as an opportunity to screw up as good as I can. 

Anywho, so I'm a flaky undependable douche bag.  What else is new?  I'll go to church in the morning with crap sleep and zombie my way through work, and then I'll start over and give it another go on Monday.

Imagine horror as hilarity.  That's how I feel now.

G'nite.

sadness

Sometimes I think, and think and think and think, about these people I've seen who have killed themselves.  And people I've known who have killed themselves.  It's a thing, in my head.  Ah God, it's a sad thing, I don't know what to do about those thoughts.  They don't present themselves as a general rule, not as a normal thing, not on a regular basis.  It's enough to just have those thoughts for a few seconds a month, enough to remind me of how awful being awake can be.   But it ain't all the time.  It's just a sad sad thing.  I think it needs to be known at least, that sadness.  It should at least be known, because ignoring it would be giving it the ok.

Thinking

I was thinking tonight on the walk home, about how the universe is like a grid, and is twisted up where gravity is. Tightened, you know, into a more dense place, where the grid lines are closer together. Planets and stars and things, and people too. Anything with mass. Then I thought, that's what people are, and alive things. Twisted up parts of space-time that are where the life is. And especially twisted up, especially dense parts, are people, the conscious alive things. The aware things. And then I thought, that hurts, that twisted up-ness. Why should that hurt? But it does. Being alive hurts. Why should that be the case? It's a natural part of the universe, that twisting up dense-ness, which the alive-ness is. But naturally it hurts. Why? Why should that be part of the natural order of things, the pain? Or is it just me?

this chance

I often wonder why I've been given this chance, when many people more deserving than myself have met such tragic ends, lost and strangers to God. I mean, I used to refer to Christians as semi-evolved simians. I laughed at their willing stupidity, and I enthusiastically viewed them with as much contempt as I could muster, placing them on a level which might as well have been infinitely below my lofty perch of enlightened knowledge. I certainly don't deserve any kind of chance at life and hope, so why do I get one when so many others didn't? What about kids that were just as stupid as me, just as young, just as old, just as confused... and who had just as much chance of possibly coming around as I was given, but they died of stupid drug overdoses, or car wrecks, or asthma attacks, or suicide? Especially the suicides. I'll never ever EVER understand that - why I get this chance, when all of those myriad hundreds and thousands and millions of people, most of whom were far more deserving than I am, never even began to have the chance that was given to me. I don't get it. I mean, real life with hope is possible for me now, when it wasn't before, and I didn't even know it. That's a miracle. I don't understand why I'm part of such a teensy minority that got that, when most people never get the chance.

bad joke

I'd finally come to the end of yet another long, grueling night of walking around Denton and reading my e-book, when I noticed that I was out of smokes. So, I went into Walgreens to buy a pack for one last lap around the town, and the guy in line behind me tossed a box of condoms onto the counter and said to the clerk, "Hey man, these are used. Do I get a discount? Heh heh heh. Heh... heh. Heh. Ahem...

Now, let me ask you... have you ever been present when a bad joke was delivered, and nobody laughed, and everybody - the young, old, weak, strong, guilty, innocent - EVERYBODY had to suffer through the intoletrable aftermath of uncomfortable silence? Imagine a terrible, terrible weapon - one that nobody would ever actually contemplate using, because the effects are devastating beyond comprehension - falling into the hands of a moron and actually being used in a random sneak attack against a group of completely neutral and unsuspecting folk; good, honest, law abiding citizens who haven't the capacity to even imagine such an atrocious act of unspeakable evil.

As you have most likely gathered, this actually happened tonight. I was a witness. I fled the scene, but I'm willing to testify.

4 years

As I walk by the church tonight, I can see oil lamps burning through the windows. It's strange to think that four years have passed since I first stepped foot in there. In a lot of ways I still feel like a stranger there, but at the same time, seeing those burning lamps gives me a feeling of security, like those are the home fires being stoked and tended.

The Lonely Strangers

The Lonely Strangers

by

Elias Ashley Davis

The lonely strangers sat side by side on the secluded park bench in silence. Neither of them could think of anything to say to the other. Finally, one of them started to say something, but stopped. The other, reacting automatically to this attempt to make a connection, also tried to say something, then stopped. They both sat there for a few more minutes in silence. Finally, both of their faces lit up as they started to say something at the same time, but being abashed at the embarrassing juxtaposition, they both stopped. Another short interlude passed. Then what seemed like an epiphany occurred to both of them simultaneously. They looked at each other, opened their mouths as if to say something, and then stopped; embarrassed that they had both shared an epiphany at the same moment. After another long pause, one of them took a deep breath in preparation, looked the other one in the eye, and finally did say something... something very large and incredible, and pontifical, and important, with such profound verbosity that the words were deadly and beautiful. The other, taken aback by this sudden outpouring, almost said something... but then someone else showed up and said something that just killed it, so the two lonely strangers just continued to sit there, saying nothing and looking like a couple of retards.

Thoughts of you

My thoughts of you keep falling into their accustomed places, so often now that I'm beginning to wonder if what I'm feeling anymore is real, or if it's just a habit. There's no way to really know, you see, and that's a truth I've come to realize with some dismay... that the memory of life isn't organized the way you or I or any of us would want it to be - like a story, with a beginning and an arc and a moral, and characters that grow and develop, and the resolution of conflict, and then ending with a lesson well learned, leaving plenty of room for a sequel. It's mostly just this chaotic mess that only happens to seem like a poem every now and then, and we want so much for it to be a poem that we learn to lie to ourselves. And from there we build our delusions, and wreak the inescapable havoc of hope.

A dream - lost in time with Giant Monsters

First I was watching events, and myself, from the third person.  I saw a much younger and healthier version of myself standing on top of a building with the wind blowing my long hair all around me.  I was happy, and triumphant, because I had traveled back in time.  I was going to find the younger version of my wife and start life all over with her.  But someone from the future was still in contact with me, and she (I dunno who she was) was saying to me, "Are you really going to abandon your present wife, your future wife, here in the present while you luxuriate in the past?"  My point of view switched to the first person as she showed me a view of my future wife without me, growing older and older, lines forming on her face, lines of sadness as well as lines of age, but still beautiful.  I changed my mind and decided to leave the past.

Something happened though, and I got lost and wasn't able to go back.  Everything was a confusing blur, and I was watching events again from outside.  I saw a view into a shower, a prison shower.  It was shower time for the prisoners.  I saw the young version of me in the shower, and heard someone say to me, "He knows how to do it.  He's the one you want."  So I saw myself walk over and stand very close to someone who I at first thought was my wife.  I was very confused, but they weren't doing anything... just standing there, very close, as if comforting each other.  Then I saw that it wasn't my wife, but a young male prisoner who looked a lot like her.  The young version of me said thank you to the guy, and walked away.  I saw everything from my own eyes again after that, and I realized that I was looking for a way back to my own time, and my wife, and somehow I'd wound up in prison.  The young kid in prison was a version of her in this weird timeline, but she was a man instead.  But he was able to remember things from the correct timeline, and he'd told me how to get back to her.

Then all of us prisoners were in line in a very large bathroom with urinals spaced very close to each other along all of the walls.  Just the way I hate it, with no dividers.  Nobody was using them though, and the line was just progressing slowing around the room.  It so weird that I suddenly burst into gales of uproarious laughter.  I was looking across the room, watching one guy shove a cream pie into his mouth and then spit the whole thing out, intact, across the room into another guys face.  It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.  The line progressed, and finally I found myself in the prison halls, and I was wearing a prison jumpsuit.

There were two people with me... my brother Matt, and one other person who was a close friend, but not identified.  We began to walk quickly down the halls, and that's when I realized that what was happening was very similar to dreams I've had before which have recurred, but I didn't realize that what was going on at the time was a dream.  What happened was, we were walking very quickly and gradually we found ourselves outside the prison and on the streets of a large metropolis.  My friend said, "I don't think we're supposed to be out here, did we escape from prison?"  I replied, "I've dreamed this before, this is so weird.  We're definitely out of prison, but I don't know how that happened."  Then Matt started running, and we ran after him.

As we ran, we dodged around different people.  It was like an obstacle course, trying to keep up with him.  I looked for my wife in the crowd, hoping that this was all happening for a reason and that I would find her here, and I got separated from my friend.  I heard him yelling to me from the other side of the street, "Keep us in sight!  Don't lose us!  Follow us around if you see us change direction!"  I looked over to the left across a busy street and saw them running flat out, up a hill towards a cross street.  The day was overcast and dreary, and the only color that stood out was a bright red hat that Matt was wearing, so I kept an eye on that.  When they got to the top of the hill, they both saw something that I couldn't see, and I heard cries of dismay and panic.  "Go to the right!  Turn with us, follow us!  Oh dear God, no no no!"  And then they disappeared behind buildings as they took the cross street. 

I had wound up in a public park, so I ran through bushes and around trees and down a hill into it, trying to catch glimpses of them between buildings on top of the next hill as they ran.  I glanced behind me and was filled with an immediate sense of fear and dread.  Dark clouds were churning in the sky, and I could hear a deep rumble with a more organic sound layered above it, but it wasn't something I could describe.  It had the effect of instantly sending me into a panic for my life.  I was more scared than I'd ever felt, and I suddenly remembered that this was just like another dream I'd had before.  I knew, I was positive, that there was a giant monster behind me, that it was attacking the city, and that it was coming closer, and that there was no way to escape from it.  This is what my brother and my friend had seen from the top of the hill that made them cry with such fear.  Even though I was terrified, I looked behind me again.  I saw what looked like another hill emerge above the hill I was running down, and it had bony protrusions growing out of it, and it was moving upward and would soon come into full view.  I didn't want to see it, so I turned back around and ran as fast as I could toward a copse of trees, and I hid in there.  I could see my brother and my friend occasionally through the buildings and trees as they ran, and then both of them suddenly stopped, looking in the opposite direction to the one I'd been running, and then they both started running towards me.  I realized with horror that there were two monsters, one ahead of me and one behind me, and that there would be no escape from them. 

I called out to my friend and my brother, and they joined me in the trees, just as the first monster emerged over the hill.  It was just enormous.  About 10 times as big as the Cloverfield monster, and it was looking right at us.  I was hoping that it might miss us, because we're so small, but no such luck.  It looked similar to the Rancor pit monster in ROTJ, but like I said, much much larger, and shaped more like something that walked on four legs.  It's mouth opened, and as I looked inside that gaping maw, I saw that it was large enough to swallow an entire football stadium, with about a hundred thousand attending people, and it would still be hungry.  It was just an incredibly huge, empty space for its head to be wrapped around... just unreal.  Insane.  At that moment, all three of us just lost our heads, and we darted out of the trees in different directions.  I was running in blind fear, as were they, with no particular strategy for evading these monsters, except to just keep moving.  I heard the second one roar and had to cover my ears, but I looked up at it and saw its tongue emerge from its mouth.  I was very long, impossibly long, and it just kept coming out, and I realized that it was prehensile, because it was grabbing trees and tossing them around as it looked for me, and that there would definitely be no escape with two of these tongues writhing around the landscape. 

All this time I had been thinking to myself, from the moment I heard the first screams of fear from my brother and my friend, that this was impossible, I've had this dream before, this can't really be happening, this is just a dream I've had, but it's really happening... how can a dream like this be real?  It can't, it's impossible, but here it is, happening, and it's real, and this is all really happening, and I just can't believe it.

I heard my brother shout to me, he was shouting urgently about a cave, that I should go into the cave.  I saw the cave, right there, and I ran inside.  I don't know what happened to my brother and my friend, and I kept running, deeper and deeper into the cave, wondering if the monster tongues could find a way inside.  I eventually found myself at the other side of the hill, and could see the second monster outside, with its tongue probing all around.  It must have smelled me with its tongue, like snakes do, because it instantly darted towards me.  I ran back into the warren of tunnels, and the tongue followed me.  I though that it had come to the extent of its reach because it suddenly stopped and splayed its end onto the wall of the cave, secreting this sticky white stuff everywhere, but it detached and came after me again.  I knew that it would be over in just a few seconds, so I stopped and drew a small foldable knife that I'd gotten for Christmas last year from my back pocket.  I opened it and determined that I'd at least give this giant monster tongue a good couple of gouges before it got me, and that's when it got me.

My first grave watch

I remember my first grave watch. I raced to get there at something something a.m. in the big fat middle of the small hours because I had overslept and was late. How can I describe what it was like to read that first psalm, psalm 102? I really can't, it was a surreal experience. A first time is always an important moment in time, like... like something that forms and then stays. Like writing your name in concrete. The moment is a thing that can be molded and caressed and put together and loved, all on the fly, and then it it is set in stone forever and ever and can never ever be changed. It kind of hurts to remember a moment that means something, like that night, at my first grave watch. It was like I was in a state of hypnosis. And it was joyful, even though it felt like the saddest thing I'd ever read at that time.

Baby Talk

I don't know a lot about what happened when I was baptized, or how God works in my life, or what the plan is, or much of anything at all. I'm pretty sure though that once I was baptized, things changed and I was no longer wandering aimlessly and without hope. I think that baptism might be a threshold - to put it simply - which is crossed. On the left side of the threshold, there are confusion and misdirection and anguish and despair and ignorance as the predominant properties. But on the right side, there are the Holy Spirit, and a plan, and love and guidance and the grace of God. Now, those things have to exist on the left side as well, or else how would anyone find their way over to the right side? Right?

The trick, or the hard part to all of this, is being able to start moving in the right direction to begin with... to the right, so that you have a chance of crossing over that threshold (I think it starts with really really wanting to, or wishing to). It's like... everything is flipped now, like the complimentary colors of a negative and positive picture. Despair and hope are flipped. It's hard to tell the difference though, during the course of each day, because we're emotionally retarded when it comes to knowing God (we're meaning I'm), so we (meaning I) confuse hope and despair because they're not as easy to tell apart as green and red, or blue and orange, or purple and yellow, or black and white. It's hard to tell them apart, as stupid as that sounds.

The way I'm describing this is like baby talk, I know. But it's these little realizations I have which occur to me in baby talk every now and then that help to keep me from drowning in despair. Knowing the difference between that side and this side, and being aware that after living for 30 something years on that side, that I somehow wound up on this side... well, that gives me a lot of hope. It's just hard to put it into the right perspective and to keep it there.

A startling truth

I think I've discovered a startling truth.  I regret the choices and mistakes I've made which led me to my present life condition, but I'm glad to be here. I regret getting hooked on drugs, but I'm glad the despair gives me a reason to pray.  I regret losing my only real friend, but I'm glad I got the church out of the bargain.  I regret not being a social creature, but I'm glad I have my solitude.  I regret that I don't have a financially stable career doing something I enjoy, but I'm glad I have my job.  I regret being a wreck of a person, but I'm glad I'm not dead. It seems to me that all of my regrets are balanced by something I'm glad of. On average, then, I have no regrets at all. But I'm also not a bit happy. Perfect balance. On average, I don't feel anything at all. I think I don't exist.

Orthodoxy In Space!

Thank you, Russians, for being awesome!  Ok, lets see... now all we need is a space church, a space priest, a space choir, some space readers, space vestments, space incense, space candles, and a bunch of space parishioners.  And Sacraments In Space!

Good will

I miss Leah more than it seems like my heart can bear sometimes.  It's been almost three years, but here it is.  I've been waiting patiently for it to go away, yet here it is.  It just hangs around on my heart, like a kitty using its paw claws to scratch itself a comfortable spot to settle down onto.  Only this kitty never finds a comfy spot, and it never settles down.  It just keeps on.  I have enough faith to know that there's a reason for this; to know that it's not just a product of my f'ed up'd-ness.  For one thing, I really do love her, so that's maybe why this ain't just drying out and spinning down the drain like the other times... but there's still something wrong with that love, must be.  Oh Lord, I'll try to do whatever You want.  There's good will inside of me.

Up and down

Real life isn't like a book or a movie, where you can be sure that when you get to the worst part, you still know that everything is going to be all right.  It's not like that... when you get to the worst part in real life, it feels like it's the end.  It really does feel like the worst part, the real worst part, like there ain't no recovery from it.  That feeling is always real, and at the moment it's occurring it's always undeniably all-powerful.  I don't know how we pull ourselves out of that, what with it having really happened and everything.  Maybe it's because when we actually do feel it, when we're experiencing things as bad as they've ever been, and it feels like it can't get any worse, the reality of the situation is that things can get worse, and probably will, eventually.  But that also means that if things can and do get worse, that things can and do get better, and that there will be an end to what feels like the worst experience, ever.  This is what I've come to know, anyway. 

I sometimes marvel at how much the life I've already lived up until now is like a movie or a book.  How there has been bad awfulness, experiences that have felt like the end of life, yet there they are... just memories, followed by more memories of how things get better, after.  Then things get bad again, worse even... but they get better again, too.  Many, many times it's happened.  It will probably... no, certainly will happen again.  I dunno how many more times, but I do know that there will always be an end to the bad to make room for the beginning of the good, and this gives me the assurance that the bad has a life expectancy.  I don't always know how long that will be, but it's always a period of time that winds up being endurable.  I feel pretty sure right now that I'm not just speaking for myself, although I'm the only person I can speak for with any certainty.  Doesn't that sound retarded?  But I think it's true.

Running commentary

Tonight I walked for a good bit. It was what I like to call one of my epic walks, a walk where things happen. It started with a meteor. Actually, no, that's not right... It had been going on for a while before the meteor; that's just when it got interesting. Right after the meteor I decided to head out into the Denton wilderness. Geez, my hands are cold. I'm wearing gloves, and it helps to blow on them really close to my mouth, but dang! Cold. Anyway, so I'm walking out on this path near this public park, and there are some close hills that make the horizon seem very near. I saw a silhouette of several trees there on the horizon, and thought... there go the Ents. Those are giants over there, giants out of mythology. I stopped to stare at them for a while, and then I'll be fragnappled if they didn't start to move! At first it scared the ever living crap out of me, but then I remembered the horizon, and how the hill made it seem abnormally close. That didn't calm my incipient panic though, because those were people, four of them, walking along in the same wilderness as me, in the dark. If I had been wearing overalls, I probably would have shit in them. I considered turning right around, but then I thought, Ash, don't be a retard. This is real life, not a movie, and those people most likely aren't serial killers. So I kept walking, and they kept walking, but our paths never crossed and we all disappeared into the dark to each other. No harm, no foul. Later I was walking by the lake, and it was so still that the reflection of the city lights in the water seemed like another complete world. By this time fog had begun to roll in, and everything seemed ethereal... like a dream. Dang my thumb is cold. It would really suck to fall down right now. Anyway, I became pretty captivated by the reflection, so I bent over so I could look at the world upside down. I saw all of that foggy reflection as the real world, and the real world as the dream. It reminded me of a recurring dream I have, one that I have often wished I could live in forever. It's impossible to explain how that dream feels, but to put it crudely, it's like a desolate longing for comfort that is never fulfilled. So I kept walking, and the fog continued to fall, and I watched rays of volumetric light seeping through the nearby tree branches, and the fog got thicker. Once again, I felt like I wanted to be up in those tree branches, dreaming away eternity. I must have gaped and gaggled at this spectacle for several minutes, because I kind of lost track of time. I think I stared at the stars for a while, because I remember orienting myself towards the north using the Big Dipper and Polaris as a guide. The Seven Sisters were just visible as seven, and I marveled at the distance between the Pleiades and the Orion Nebula, a vast distance of light years which I could traverse with my eye in half a second. It didn't seem real at all. Now I'm home and I hear sleep calling. I love my sister and my brother in law. And their dogs, too. Dogs represent all the best qualities of people.

Just Started Year

I worked a little bit late tonight, because we had so much beer going out the door and it kept needing to be stocked. It was about 11 o'clock by the time I left the store, and on the way home, a cop flashed his lights at me as he passed me. Even though I know most of the cops in Denton because they come into the store so often, this scared the crap out of me. I'm afraid of cops, always will be... it has to do with my illicit history which I hope I will be able to leave behind me someday. Anyway, most of those cops know me too, and since I wasn't captured and taken to hell, I'm sure he was just wishing me a happy new year in his cop way. A few minutes later I passed a house that was partying it up and counting down to the rollover. A guy and a girl ran by at that point, both with a beer in each fist, and when the countdown reached zero they swung there beer laden arms around each other and kissed. I felt a little jealousy at that moment, as I usually do when I'm reminded of what I don't have, but those moments usually pass pretty quickly. Now I'm almost home, and I can hear regularly intermittent fireworks. Happy New Year everybody! I just know those fireworks are going to keep me up while I'm trying to sleep.