Half Drawn Fish (Part 1)

At the edge, where the tree line made a dense cut into the valley below, I stopped, too frightened to enter without caution.  I was exhausted and exhilarated, face hot and flushed red.  I knew out of the corner of my mind that something wasn't right, like a very real dream where you perceive but accept the oddity--until later when you realize how fucked up the experience was.  This was as real as I could accept for the moment and the sweat dripping from my forehead and into my eyes clarified that this was not a dream.  Not this time.  I took a hesitant step into the overgrown brush.  I would have to make my own path through here.  What was I looking for? I'm chasing somebody, but why?  Lights, I was looking for dots of lights.  For the past hour I had seen them flickering just behind me or on the other side of the street wherever I walked.  The people with lights always turned into a stone or mailbox or bush whenever I turned around to eye them.  I was done with the insanity so why did they have to keep following me?  They never chased me, no, not that I could remember anyway.  They just followed.  FBI maybe.  I can't even remember what it is I've done that is so bad.  They were after me, I had done something.  Maybe they had something to do with the snakes.  They were still coming and going but at this moment I am free from the biting sods.

Lights.  For a moment I catch two or three moving in and out of the vertical shadows about a hundred feet down.  This is going to be risky.  My heart was beating so hard it offset the rhythm of my breathing and I had to start taking conscious gasps for oxygen.  I glanced behind me and saw the playground with the community center in the background.  Yesterday I had been crawling up to the porch on my hands and knees, hiding from the cops.  They knew I was there.  Why didn't they get me when they had the chance?  I hated this game.  Cat and mouse--I'm being pawed and toyed with.  That must be why my new pants are torn to shreds - I had been hiding from the cops for hours last night.  I must have passed out up there.  How many hours had it been before I got home?  How long have I been out now.  They're going to worry if I'm out too late.  They know something is up.  I can't though, I have to end this now before I lose it like I did yesterday.  I need to catch one of these bastards and end it.

I take a few more steps and slip on the light covering of foliage lain on the steep valley, falling on my side and sliding down a few yards.  I panic thinking they'll get me while I'm down and unable to fight. For a few seconds nothing happens.  It could have been an hour for all I know.  I'm wide awake but my muscles are screaming from overuse and strain.  I can't move them.  Yesterday was too much to handle.  Why did I decide to leave the house this evening?  Oh right, the snakes.  They were relentless.  I make another effort to stand up but end up sliding farther down the valley.  Another few tries with the same results.  Now the underbrush is scraping against my skin through the holes in my jeans and I start to bleed.  But I can't feel any pain other than shear dread.  They must be right on top of me by now!  Where am I?  I don't know.  I don't know.  How can I not know where I am?  This must be a dream.  No, it's a nightmare.  I finally manage to get up on two feet.  As long as I lean against a solid tree I'll be fine or at least able to defend myself.  I don't dare look up to see the points of light so near.  I forget them.  With all the effort it took to stand I forget about my motive too and just stare down at the ground that is getting increasingly darker as the sun sets behind the mountains of the San Francisco State refuge.

I loved this place like anyone loves a dream finally come true.  It is never what you expect from all your time in expectation but you set aside incorrect notions for the sake of the dream just so you don't have to admit this isn't what you really wanted.  For over a month I had routines that made this lifestyle possible.  At least once (and often two or three times) a week I would wake up early, make myself breakfast before anyone awoke and walk down to the bay.  I like to have solitude with my morning meal so that no one can hear me crunch the cereal that is inevitably too loud for grace.  It's an embarrassing trait that always goes unnoticed along with all my other obsessive compulsions.  After I'm done I quietly pack my backpack.  I don't want to wake anyone before I go.  They think I'm absurd taking these extravagantly long, solitary strolls.  In goes a book, my iPod and headphones and usually some fruit or other food to eat later on.  And of course cigarettes.  I light up my cig and look into the pack to see how many I have left.  Just a couple and a lucky.  I should stop by the gas station on the way out but they don't have my favorite flavor.  I should wait till later and find a place that sells them.

Camel Turkish Silvers - It's worth the extra walk and bucks to have something I can melt into when I smoke instead of just pulling the cig to my mouth as a matter of routine.  About a year earlier I started smoking Silvers because of Elena, a girl I had met through a friend of mine.  I thought she was pretty cool.  She worked in the student forum back at college and was usually identified with her dreaded hair, very unlike the Notre Dame style of preppy clothes and the ever so universal UGG boots.  Fucking conformists.  Her and I ended up bonding over half studied homework and a free pizza from Sbarro in the basement where she worked, a perk of her job.  One of my fondest memories of that year was driving to the 7 Eleven on Douglas Road with Elena to buy Silvers (my first time trying them) then sitting on the sidewalk out front smoking in the warmth of the late summer sun.  Elena showed me how the cigarette paper magically burned around the letters on the side of the cig so that for a brief moment you could see the words 'Turkish Silver' illuminated in glowing orange until the wind or time would clear the evidence of the magic.  I really miss those simple moments but every time I light up I get a warm feeling from the memory.

As I recall Elena and I ended our friendship later that year when I got drunk and texted her for a spare cig after watching the ending to Six Feet Under.  She refused to give me a cig even if I offered to pay for it and walk all the way to her dorm.  In hindsight we both admitted the stupidity on both our parts but never talked much after that.  Rory, my best friend who was with me at the time, never forgave her or spoke to her either.  We were idiots.  We both had a habit of dispensing with our friends when they weren't like us in every possible way.  If he and I weren't so much the same I think we would have been alone through most of college.  We were the only people we could stand most days and some days not even that.  We ended up calling one of his ex's for a ride to the station.  A saving grace.  That was another habit of ours; calling ex girlfriends for favors. Neither of us could seem to appreciate what we had presently but we got a lot of free rides and reminders that we were complete assholes.

In California I would set out down the road with my addiction in hand and sun at my back.  It was an eight mile walk up and down steep hills through San Mateo and Foster City before I would see water.  In my head I would be thinking about morality and existential philosophies and relationships. Thoughts that were constantly doing math inside my skull.  It was either a head full of a thousand little thoughts or one driving idea that I absolutely had to figure out and articulate.  The previous semester of college I started to see the schools shrink about the mental fatigue I was getting. I felt like such an egocentric asshole when I told him I was having so much trouble because I thought too much.  It was a truthful problem though.  At times I would be overcome with an ecstasy of thought patterns that kept growing and growing and growing.  Even though I knew it was all metaphysical I still became scared that my brain would tear through my head to make room for all I was trying to fit in it.  The shrink was a brother of Holy Cross Congregation and very reassuring that nothing was wrong at all.  I only half believed him at the time but should have known he wasn't who I should have been talking to when he suggest I smoke more pot.

The exhaustion must have been more in my head than in my legs because the eight miles often would pass with nothing to show for it but lost weight and something about which to write.  By the time I came to the rocky edge of the bay I was too tired to turn right around and make the uphill walk back home.  So I enjoyed the reward, the immense San Francisco Bay and San Mateo bridge (one of the largest bridges in the world).  Out of my pack I took the much needed fruit and cig but the book and music stayed inside.  I wanted to hear and feel everything these moments had to offer.  Especially since I would be there alone, every time.  This was my dream, or at least one I had agreed upon with my best friend.  We wanted, and still want, to be at the beach together with wine and music and surfing the Californian waves for as long as possible.  The simple things.  This isn't Souther California, the Pacific Ocean, no wine or music or surf boards or even each other but it's the closest I've come so far to having the dream I wanted.  Despite the beautiful scenery, I have to admit it's lonely and the falling sun means that I'll be walking home in the dark.  Another eight miles.  I would go through this routine as often as I could.

On the other days I was looking for work, a task I thought would be much easier than it turned out.  Recently I was hired at a local Subway and had gone through training and was just about to work my first full day as a sandwich maker.  I was nervous.  While it might not be that difficult of work I had too many other things on my mind to concentrate on what I was suppose to be doing.  I made a lot of mistakes but my manager was really nice and didn't give me a hard time.  She reminded me of that girl who has a tattoo show on TV.  She had a lot of piercings in all the places that managers weren't suppose to have and tattoos on almost every visible part of showing skin.  Only in California was this okay.  I loved it.  But my first day would turn out to be one of a hundred hellish experiences that I went through that summer.  My best friend more than once would referred to me as Job from Hebrew scripture.  I suppose in some ways he was right, but the only thing Job did was exist at the wrong time.  I, on the other hand, had no such record with God or with morality.  This plight was deserved.

Looking up from my suffering and confusion I see no more dots of light and I begin to think about turning around and heading back.  I can save this fight for another night if I am graced with another day of life yet.  I start to move my legs which still are throbbing from the day of unrest and chasing when I see a familiar sight coming toward me.  The lights.  They are now gathering and heading my way instead of going the other direction as had been happening.  They were no longer fleeing from me but seeing how injured I was were now making their way for the kill.  I finally snap and start screaming for help.  "They're after me!  They're after me!"  But nobody is around this time of day to hear the shrills and calls for help.  Closer. Closer.  Almost on top of me but my legs won't move very quickly and every time I try to get up the steep hill I fall and slide nearer to the enemies.  I am done for.  There is no hope left.  This is the end and look at the state in which I'm going to die! I'm friendless, broke and have no way out. I'm going to die.

Time behaves in peculiar ways when you are dreaming.  They act the same when you're high.  So the length of time it took to call 911 on my cell, connect with the operator and explain that I was going to die and that I needed help, was long enough that my hallucinated enemies never made it to my body.  I don't know how long it took for the cops to find me but by the time they did my body was lifeless, caked in mud, bloody and scarred.  The officer who found me had to climb down and drag me up to the park where another cop was waiting.  One held me up because I couldn't stand on my own while the other asked me questions that I never thought would be directed my way.  I had only heard them on TV where it was the criminals and worthless men who had to answer.  No sir, I don't have anything sharp in my pockets.  No sir, I don't have any drugs on me.  No sir, I haven't been taking any drugs.  I don't think the most gullible person on earth would have believed my lies.  So I tell him that I have done drugs in the past just so that I could save some face from my worthlessness.  Admitting fault, even in the hands of the law, draws temporary relief and at that moment I took anything I could get.  To this day I don't know why I wasn't arrested and locked up.  The officer who took my license (which I had used earlier to drive on the highway at high speeds just after peaking from my recent fix) just looked at my out-of-state name and gave it back.  I don't think they ever checked out to see if I had a record.  But this is California.  The state where you can smoke weed in front of police in public and feel safe but then be ridiculed for smoking a cigarette because it is 'bad for your health'.  Fuck them, but tonight it saved my ass.  The cop who found me asks where I live--just a few blocks away--while the other gets back in the car.  He walks me back to my place where I was staying with friends talking to me the whole way while his partner drives slowly beside us.  The whole painful walk had me terrified.  So far I had gotten off okay but I wasn't sure what he would do when we got back to my place.  I thought for a minute about walking up to one of the neighbors houses and feigning nobody home.  But I walk up to my regular drive and stopped.  I tell the cop that this is my place and wait to see what move he makes next.  All he says is to get some rest and stay inside till the morning.  That's it.  I could have kissed him.  But the horror had just begun and every break I caught from then on was the one that kept me above death.

They must have thought I was just high on pot and had a bad trip or something. But smoking pot was petting kittens to what really happened. Several weeks earlier Rory, my best friend, had flown in from Maryland to spend a few days with me in the Bay and then drive down to San Luis Obispo to see Karen and then on to Los Angeles to check out some film schools, AFI, USC and UCLA.  He had been into film for a long time and I had started to help him with film projects as they came up.  I even worked on occasion at this club on campus that had small bands come through.  It was my job to either help film or direct the show from an A/V room in the back.  We connected with film and music and it turned out that I loved the work, hard as it was at times, and thought about making a career of it myself.  I needed to see my friend again even then before things got bad.

The last semester of school was torturous and never-ending.  At some point between sophomore and junior year I had grown frustrated with what I was learning in my religion and philosophy classes.  My major.  Every class was just an argument between me and my professors or no dialogue at all, which was a sign that I had lost so much interest in what I was learning that it wasn't even worth voicing my opinions.  It had been a messed up several years of sacrifice that led me to giving up my own ambitions to devote my life to the Catholic Church, which I was assured would answer my questions and give me life if only I put in my entire faith.  Another leap. Now I was seriously question the decision I had made both in lifestyle and in academia.  There is much on that later but for now it is only important to know that the despair from years of torment were coming to a head that summer.  I just needed a friend.

I was staying with Alex, a friend of mine from school, who was tired of the same shit I was at the time and a good friend to talk to for sanity.  She invited me to stay with her and her mother for the summer in San Mateo in exchange for company, cooking and the occasional cleaning.  She was in a bad place herself at the time and rarely left the house, an experience that I could relate to.  The semester before I often had trouble mustering the strength to walk out my dorm room door for class.  It wasn't that I didn't want to go (which at times I suppose I didn't) or that I was a slacker; I simply couldn't overcome the sense of impending doom I got from leaving the comfort of my room.  Some times I would stay in my room and catch up with the professor later and sometimes I left for class.  I always ended up regretting either decision.  I suppose that is why I was at Notre Dame, across the street, so much instead of my home campus at Holy Cross.  It was a place to get away but still be around people who could keep up with conversation so to speak.  I had a love for knowledge and a hatred for ignorance.  At college I saw too much of the later and knowledge wasn't what I was looking for in the end.  It drove me crazy.  Alex had had enough and was staying permanently in California, permanently in her house.

As I recall it was just her mother and I who drove to SFO to pick up Rory from the airport.  She may have mustered the courage I often could not at school and come with us but the specific details of those days faded when the shit started to happen.  I think Rory was a little nervous in staying in the house.  We were all fucked up in one way or another those days and the need to get out of that funk sometimes trumped the need for camaraderie with fellow miserable friends.  Rory and I ended up driving Alex's mom's car downtown that night and finding an Irish pub.  I think it was to remind us of the closest home we had back on campus.  The friendship that bound us so closely was still tight but not intense that summer.  We were fed up with misery and couldn't see enough into each other enough to make our time together anything more than just a comfort.  We ended up buying some cigarettes at a CVS downtown and walked to a place called O'Neill's a few blocks away.  Inside we ordered Guinness because of our special mid-summer reunion (a tradition between us) and sat down at a booth in the back.

Rory only liked to order dark beer when he wasn't planning on getting drunk and tonight we had to stay sober since we had to drive back.

Rather he had to drive back.  At the time I was driving on a suspended license because I had a ticket I couldn't pay for and then I didn't receive my new license plate paperwork in the mail so I was caught again for being past due and had to pay an extra fine and got my card taken away.  All I had now was a state ID from when I went to Rome on a class trip the March before.  The only reason I had cash for the beer was because I sold my Macbook a few weeks before.  I couldn't find a job as I said and I was running too low on funds to purchase cigs and, eventually, a flight back to Indiana.  I got six hundred for a machine I paid twelve hundred for the year before but I didn't care.  Before the summer was up I had spend all that money on... I don't remember but probably alcohol, drugs and cigarettes.  I think the only reasonable purchase I had made that summer was a $60 pair of headphones and a bottle of California's finest dessert wines somewhere between Atascadero and Templeton. 

The bar was decorated the way pubs are when they want to look like genuine Irish pub but end up looking like Irish Applebees' with rugby playing on the TVs and several maps of Ireland.  The Irish must use these maps when they're too sloshed to find their way home.  Or maybe this isn't a genuine pub.  Regardless, what we thought we'd feel there wasn't what we wanted.  Back home we were regulars at a placed called Corby's, an American pub made famous by being filmed in the movie Rudy.  There was nothing special about this place compared to most pubs but we made it ours.  Every Thursday without fail we would manage our way to Corby's to smoke, fail at pool and talk about how much we wished we weren't with our girlfriends.  We made a lot of confessions in that bar and had a lot of good laughs.  I think we tend to forget about all the sorrow and silence that went along with it too.  It's better just to remember the good times.  The next summer when I was still dealing with the aftermath Rory flew back to Notre Dame for his graduation and called me up so we could hang out in Corby's one last time.  (A joke among us was that we had multiple last meetings at Corby's that never seemed to hold.  But this time it seemed it would really be the last time. And it was, so far)  I was starting to lose everything at that time, including my sanity.  I had no job, just lost my car and was beginning to see the door close at the end of the tunnel.  I take a car that a friend graciously let me borrow and drove up to see him, needing the time together more than anybody knew.  But not even halfway there the car broke in a very unfixable way and I never made it to see him.

The following day we all thought it was best to get out of the house and see the city before driving down south to see Karen.  Even Alex said she would go with us to San Francisco and show us around.  So the three of us piled into her bright yellow Beetle and drove out to see the sights.  Our first stop was the Golden Gate Bridge.    Something tells me that whether we spoke of it or not we all thought about what it would be like to jump over the side and forgetting everything.  Before walking back to the car I came within moments of jumping over the side myself, but not because I wanted to kill myself, rather, Rory and I found a brand new Blackberry down below on the other side of the railing that was dying to be taken under the law of 'finders keepers'.  I tried so hard to reach through the spaces in the railing but it was just enough out.  Even the gangling arms and legs on Rory couldn't manage.  I could hop on the other side and get it easily but I would be putting my life within inches of death - which I wasn't ready for quite yet - and the guard would surely be on us quickly enough.  This bridge is the number one location for suicide in the world.  On record more than one person jumps every two weeks.  But that's just the record, which is taken off one side of the bridge and only during daylight.  There is a film out called The Bridge about this problem.  The director placed a 24 hour camera on the bridge for months, capturing many suicides, failed suicides and attempted suicides where the person was caught or talked out of making the leap.  This place is still one of a few outlets I keep in the back of my mind.  My last effort was to swing my new headphones down over the railing and try to move the phone a bit closer to reach.  It never ended up working and we had to leave for lunch but to this stay I still have the orange-red paint of the Golden Gate still scratched into my headphones.

Lunch was at a place called Harvey's near Haight-Ashbury, named after Harvey Milk, a hero in this area and in history.  You might have seen the movie about him.  On the drive there I was famished and looking forward to sitting down to some greasy fries and a cheeseburger.  We passed through a lot of steep, hilly streets on the way there, looking for a parking space, going through areas that look typically like San Francisco.  It wasn't until we hit the Haight District that things became bewilderingly different.  Rainbow flags, head shops and well dressed gay men and women everywhere!  I didn't admit it to anyone at the time but I felt comfortable here in a way I had never been before.  I was home.  After lunch we all walked down Haight street to a few stores and picked up some booze.  The lead singer for Third Eye Blind, Stephen Jenkins, was from around here and wrote a lyric about walking Haight Street to the store.  It was this band that broke the indifference of Rory and my relationship and it just so happened to be our favorite, so we followed the lyric in action to deepen a part of our time there and with each other.  Just before sunset we brought the alcohol, plenty of cigarettes and ourselves to a beach along the coast to watch the sun touch the ocean and slowly sink into the night.  Part of my dream came true for that hour as we inhaled the deep salty air and cigarettes, chasing each moment with a swig from the can.  Rory and I would end up reliving these beach scenes several times over the next couple of years in different parts of the country but I think this time stood out as special.  I think it was the mountains coming right out to sea.  We had both talked about how much that meant to our senses.  Or maybe it was the fact that it was our first time on the beach together in California.  A taste that there might be hope in the future after all.

The next day we woke up around sunrise and Alex drove Rory and I down to San Jose where Karen was going to pick us up.  I had taken the train down here about a month before to see a free Third Eye Blind show in a park.  I nearly died that day sneaking in and out of various gang territory I had stumbled into.  The more I think about that summer the more I remember times I nearly died while lost.  But the show was great fun and added to my repertoire of 3eb shows.  Karen was already there when we arrived (late) so we hurriedly transfered our bags and said our goodbyes to Alex.  It took about three hours to drive from there to Templeton where she lived.  We broke the silence with the new Dane Cook CD which was a disappointment but it let us relax before getting to her place.  Karen was my first friend at Holy Cross College beyond my roommates and people I already knew from Notre Dame.  She sat one seat behind me and to the right in my Introduction to Philosophy class with Professor Gareau.  She was cute.  Long, dark hair and brown eyes, a sweet smile.  I ended up being in love with her that whole first semester, but nothing more than an awkward date and frustration came from it.  The next year she started dating Rory before we met and the three of us began hanging out all the time.  Now they were on and off dating (still) and it gave the two of us an excuse to go see her and make use of her pool house.  That week spend drinking wine and smoking cigars in her hot tub would be the calm before the storm.  We toured many of the local wineries, got as drunk as possible and made sure we wouldn't forget what we had being here.  After visiting some of her friends in San Luis and a very odd game of Cranium with a stupid, peeing dog we drove down to LA to check out the scene and look into some grad schools for Rory.  We had fun at Santa Monica beach, walked around the Six Feet Under exterior set and were in generally pissy moods the whole time.  Even the booze, cigs and alcohol weren't enough to make the hotel any fun.  I was happy to get back and pretty soon it was all over.  Rory was gone and I was back in San Mateo about to find a job.  It was then that things got bad.

She Would Not Cry If She Understood

This is a page from a collection of over a hundred posts I recently came across beginning in Mid-2005 through part of college.  I thought I would start bringing some of these out to be seen.  I completely forgot about all of this.


Earlier today I was folding laundry when I stopped and thought awhile about a particular gray shirt. While nothing is necessarily special about the shirt, it holds a fond memory of my father. He was always good at trivia and used it to win free tickets through the local radio stations. When he was younger the city newspaper featured him for his ridiculous amount of winnings, calling him the Trivia Pig. In the summer of 2006 he won preview tickets to the new Mission Impossible movie and invited me along. While walking through the door they gave us gray shirts that said M:I:III 05:05:06.

Folding the shirt and adding it to the pile I thought awhile about that date. The summer of 2006 was quite awhile after I had left the house. At that time I didn't get to spend much time with my family and when I did it was almost always with my dad. I think my mom knew I didn't want to spend time with her. That is not to say that I didn't before this whole mess. Before, I would gladly spend time with her. We had a common interest in woodworking and design. Whenever the house was in need of repair or we were making additions I was recruited as a helping hand. Her voice still echoes in my thoughts, "You were the one I trusted when daddy had problems... you were the one I could talk to." In the year or so that we were allowed to talk this theme was brought up over and over again. That and the crying. It was for this reason that I avoided her afterwards. When she would cry so hard that she couldn't breath what was I to say. I couldn't help her because not even I understood.

I used to think that it was her motherly emotions she couldn't control. Perhaps this is still a reason, but I think now there is some larger matter involved. It is the very same reason that I no longer cry over lost faith. Suddenly realizing that your faith is nearly completely misguided has a huge impact on the emotions. Not only because God becomes something different, but also because your complete reality changes. I say suddenly because when something is life-changing, several months to a year is instant. Even months after leaving the faith I was hit with new understanding. Imagine thinking that you would live on earth for eternity, growing up with this idea, and then finally understanding that this would not happen. To understand heaven and hell; these things are destructive, they cannot be taken in one single pill. Our minds simply cannot handle it.

But the truth, though hard to swallow, is beautiful. I understand that now and do not cry over the bitter change. If my mother knew that she would react the same. I worry for her. Everything is not lost, but she doesn't know that. She doesn't know that her son isn't dead, that he is very much alive. Seventeen years of doctrine was difficult enough to change, her forty-five years may be unchangeable, but there is still hope. How do you convince someone like this that you don't worship the devil just because you're Catholic? But even if understanding is possible a yet great questions arises. Will I still love the people I once knew?

I recently read a book that says a boys first heartache always comes from his father. I suppose this may be true but the hardest heartache most certainly comes from a girl he falls in love with. My heart's first scar came from the very girl that showed me the way to Catholicism. After four years of knowing her and several years of dealing with the battles and heartbreak of losing my family, we no longer speak. I suppose we've gone without speaking before, but never this long and to this extent. I never thought it was possible to stop loving her or even to stop missing her, but I have forgotten these things. There isn't even a blank place in my heart for her like there once was. It is very strange to know that you cannot even be a friend of someone you once had such an attachment to. It is the very same with my mother and father and sister. My sister most of all. Her and I had such a closeness that our friends constantly mentioned it. Now, as before, it's only strangeness, a feeling that you can only talk to the memory of her but with a grim mask and speech.

As a Catholic, I should want them to join me in my faith, but I don't. I don't because I would feel lonelier with them than without. I don't want to realize that my sister is gone from my memory. I don't want to realize that I have missed out on so many lives. I don't want to remember my little cousin's name. This blank space keeps me with greater company.

After The Rain

I have many words and few minutes so this one will be short but concise.

The reason I have few minutes is because I don't presently have my laptop.  It broke.  So I am borrowing the office computer between job tasks and looking busy all the same.  We don't have much work this week at the community.  As January slows life outside, we slow inside.  This is good news as I was not eager to charge fully ahead into the phone-calling, email-typing, log-dragging work week that will become the norm very soon.  I am coming off a few weeks spent in Providence where I had a healthy balance of lonely freedom and warm companionship.  With the oddity of life out in the woods creeping unnervingly close to normality in my head it was a good relief to encounter the chaos of the small city.  Four days home back now and fully integrated and comfortable I am looking ahead to the future.  Not that I haven't found a happiness and knowledge here but because of that fact.  As is common with those my age I am unsettled in being settled.  What I have come for I have found and now am eager to exploit the details of how I found happiness in solitude and community and how the events and people I have come to know have changed my perspective on life for the better and for the bitter.  I have signed up for several more Americorps opportunities and rewritten my resume for whatever may come this summer.  Though drastically early to be looking for jobs I browse the internet listings like a young girl looking through a store of wedding dresses - the unattainable, the brevity of which seeming inconsequential.

In the free time of this week I have taken to reading all that I meant to read while on vacation.  But today I read a book that was not on my list but one I was told I must read!.  The Shack, a book intended on being sold to the the overzealous Christians of the Midwest (instead of apparently those who need to be saved) is a piece of literature for- I was convinced - the weak-minded, hope-filled person searching for faith in a redemptive, huggable God.  Instead, I was right.  Please, dear reader, do not believe I have been reading only for which to rant.  I would much rather read something I enjoyed.  Instead I opened the book as I opened to Christianity several years back: with confidence and faith respectively.  I have the same mental thought as of a physicist I heard on NPR last week.  That is, through science and reason I must believe in the greater likelihood of something other than God and heaven and justice, but that does not stop me from wanting there to be something good and nourishing after I die.  My fall from family and promise of hope in Catholicism were both taken with the drug I was offered.  Faith, it would seem, would get me through it all and answer the possible questions.  That it did and I was unsatisfied with the juvenile responses I received from people I trusted most.  I think this is what adults often call 'tough love'.  But this kind of love is one-sided with no true ill intent.

The book, as I described to Ellen this afternoon, has more worth and truth on the outside than the combined pages within.  The first two quotes on the back cover are from recording artists, obviously the best critique comes from celebrities, from which the first reads, "THE SHACK is the most absorbing work of fiction I've read in many years.  My wife and I laughed, cried, and repented of our own lack of faith along the way.  THE SHACK will leave you craving for the presence of God."  Below that in the description of the story tells us, "In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant THE SHACK wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?"  The answers Mack [main character] gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him."  The truth within these statements is not a kind one but a dauntingly factual one.  The human community knows itself better now than ever before.  We know and can see vast evidence for our emotional psyches transforming fundamental truth.  But when it comes to the unproven we want to believe, so much so that we are willing to give in to the piece of our mind that sways us off course almost every time.  Some scoff at those who believe in alien encounters and unknown monsters while being lured themselves into believing fully in any author who has little ability to write a story but tells us what we want to hear, the unbelievable, that if it's too good to be true, then it's true.  The words within this overpriced novel offer as much hope as a loan shark, offering you riches and then beating you senselessly to death in the end.

This is not a critique on the belief of a god but a statement for how one believes.  Surely what we know as fact today will change many times over.  Not long ago we had nine planets, now we have eight.  Science does what religion will never be able to do, question itself, admit its own errors and move forward with truth.  We have an inherent function within our brains that makes a truth out of a lie if it is believed and repeated enough. I can speak for this personally as I have bought into the continued lie enough times to recognize the enemy at the gate.  At many points in my upbringing I was taken to falling at the feet of God in tears begging God to step out from silence and for once give an answer whether it satisfied me or not.  Only did answers come when I questioned the source.  When I finally opened the door to the rational world I received a flood of answers and understanding like a lifetimes worth of mail waiting in piles for me to come home from vacation.  And so my point is to say, question question question everything you know, especially that which and whom you trust.  If you want something to be true for truths sake it will be much more difficult to see past your own illusions.  Those who read this novel and come out of it saying they have renewed faith in god are not doing so because the author gave reasonable examples and reasonings to trust that there exists a supernatural being.  No, instead they went into it wanting to believe and through the conduit of fantastical illusions came out of it satisfied.  Truth is most often not that satisfying and will leave you wishing you didn't find out.  Deeply religious people often get what they want in terms of faith.  Like a child who wants and is given everything in the toy store, many religious members are spoiled by what they want.

But the part that hurts me the most (and it truly does) is that this is done completely unknowingly.  The bratty child in the store is often looked at with contempt and hatred.  But that child is not at fault - it is merely following the pattern set by its parents and peers.  I do not hate nor do I feel contempt toward religious people.  I am hurt because I have found a feast and am unable to inform the hungry.  I shout and I plead but am rarely heard.  On the contrary I am given backlash, sometimes from those I love most.  (I even had a taxi driver let me off conveniently seven blocks from my destination for saying that despite what my shirt said I did not believe Jesus to be "an army of one")  My mission as a youth was to convert people to my understanding (dare I say my parent's understanding) of Jesus.  But I do not have a mission now nor do I belong to any kind of group.  But I will not look you in the face and lie any longer.  When I lied and said I believed and said I loved and said I was satisfied I was given comfort and a smile from my fellow students.  But now that I tell the truth and clean out my closet and live honestly and purely I am condemned and rejected by them.  I was invited by some of these friends on facebook to join in a religious gathering of scripture reading today.  I defriended them.  I do not picture them as my enemy but I do not wish to be bombarded by the flat-earthers of the modern age.  There is only so much I can take and just because I call it ignorance does not mean I say it snidely.  I do not jest at them with derision as many like me do. But I cannot help my own frustration of losing so many years.  After the rain falls we can either be cleansed or muddied.  Maybe I have a foot in both.

Like In The Movies

"Life was shit," has been my intro to describing an experience of the last several years.  It is much easier than the alternative, longer version, which begins, "I was happy," and expresses more succinctly not only the truth but the more interesting bits of someone else's experience.  My experience.  An episode that lasted and was held together with words like, "life is shit."  It hits to the heart of the matter I think.  From the standpoint of the present tense I am proud, no, understanding of what just happened.  I have something to say now.  The older our generation gets the more entitlement we feel we deserve for quiet rooms and fear-struck audiences to hear out the 'wisdom' of the events and general knowledge we got from school or relationships or the drifting, socially acceptable, relative truth we picked up from the majority.  I am being facetious of course.  I am one of those people.  But I have an argument to back my case and I think it is worthwhile to hear out.  I'll not make this a forum for lecture, however, I would rather say these thoughts aloud where gestures and questions can carry on their work between us.  Even philosophers who define every important word they use cannot communicate an idea accurately to their peers.  Best not to pretend.

I took a frightening test online yesterday - life expectancy generated by Reuters.  The punchline is that I have fifty years to live, and I'll add 'if I'm lucky'.  A third of anything can be tragic or ecstatic.  In the case of a life lived I think it has the bittersweetness of both.  If I hold to my best guess this is all that we have, us noble human beings, and noble we most certainly.  Kings and pawns are both made out of the same carefully hewn marble against a mathematically and beautifully simple board.  Humans and the universe operate on a similar principle.  The compromise for complexity in our race is that we are bound to be a short-lived phenomena, either expelling ourselves through ignorance or being extinguished by the natural order of destruction and regeneration.  That we can understand that is one of our unique qualities.  I think we could cherish that a little more.  But my argument is not for the universal so much as the local and more current existence.  The fifty years I may have left.  I don't want to put words into anyones mouth so I will suppose in generalizations.

While living a morally, righteous and healthy lifestyle is what I often say I want, it of course isn't.  Those things are just principles that can be used when necessary to protect an otherwise debaucherous (a word?) life I really want.  If I haven't said so I am on a break from Agape Community along with the other interns.  I chose my vacation alone in Providence.  When I left I gave everyone a hug and visualized that the next time I saw them I would have a conversation about how much I miss being on the farm in simplicity and nature.  "Oh the glorious things I longed for while I was gone in the crazed, unnatural city."  I don't think this is going to happen.  Unless I am mugged and raped on the streets before going back I think I will have to admit that I love being here.  I know the reaction already for it has already come up with my subconscious.  We in the West cannot continue to live the way we do.  Not so long from now things will become just as radically different as they have in the recent past because we no longer have the resources natural and unnatural to continue.  I am not afraid of that happening.  In fact, I hope for it.  At Agape the idea is that we all need to move back into the woods and live naturally and simply.  We don't eat meat because it is unkind to animals, yes, but also because history says that we are not designed with teeth or organs to digest the food properly.  This is where one of my arguments comes in:  I don't buy it.  And it's a simple as this.  We are not now what we once were.  We are evolving just as much and often more than the life around us.  I can believe in the possibility that humans were once herbivores, but I also believe that at a given point we found it beneficial to eat something other than fruits and vegetables and beans and berries.  The claim is also that we are conscious enough to realize we can live without harming what is around us.  While this is true - that all beings are engineered to stay alive - I am also a piece of the natural order, one in which I cannot change to any significant degree.  This is just an example of so many pointless topics.  At some point in history there was a man or woman who thought up the idea to have definitions for who humans were and what they 'ought' to do... mythologically speaking.  This, I believe, is the root to every organization/religion/government that sets out to order human life.  We are not ducks lined up in a particular fashion that is perfect.  Nor are we going anywhere where those rules apply.  I am tearing through the farce like a wrecking ball to an already crumbling building, clearing the way so as to see the whole scenery behind.  This is all done inside but I have gained the confidence to admit it via weariness rather than ego.  Existence is not perfect, most would agree, but not because of any fallacy on our part.  We are because we must have been and we need to start living our lives that way.  The special, observable seat we sit in allows us to make life better for ourselves by helping others and so I do not promote total anarchy.  That said, life will happen as it happens, unaided by us.  Can we effect anything? I don't know... I try so hard, but I don't know.  I will say that admitting who I am is best thing I have ever done.  I think if I can effect someone I would do so by letting them out of the asphyxiating bag of religious belief, of social normalcy.  Say it understandingly and without fear!  I am this this gender, attracted to this gender.  I am destructive to others. I want to change - I want not to change.  I have been a greedy, untrustworthy, debaucher and I am unafraid to say so.  This is not about pride. This is about clearly seeing where you have come from and accepting the life that comes from that.  Admit that you crave sex or masturbate, steal, lie, cause others pain.  It is not about the liberty. It is not about the pride. It is about living without the weight of unnecessary (and unnatural) guilt.  People will either fail or succeed in the eyes of those who try to categorize rules so that we can fit into their standards.  There are no standards - there is only chaos.  But that is not the end of the story.  Despite truth, there is beauty, there is relationship.  And maybe, just maybe there is something more.

I have been rewatching season three of Californication today in expectation of the coming fourth season beginning in a few weeks.  If you haven't seen the show the main character, Hank Moody, is a writer in Southern California who unapologetically drinks, smokes, man-whores (it's now a verb) while trying to father a child.  Anyone who likes the show has a special place for Hank - we love that he is an asshole who sleeps around.  What keeps us liking him, however, is that he sincerely wants to be a good father.  I get chills when I see him on screen in the warmth of California, smoking a cigarette with nothing to do but enjoy life and drink away the tragedy of what it took to get there.  I honestly want that - like it is in the movies.  But life is most definitely not like that.  And so in the same moment it's not what I want.  Instead I submit to an alternative.  It's not perfect or moral or healthy or anything to do with groups.  It's soaking in what can be for as many moments as possible.  It's dragging on the best experience of our lives for as long as possible.  It's a radical submission because I don't think it happens very often. I would say that it's impossible because I don't personally know anyone who has pulled off a life like that but I am setting off to be the first.  I spoke with a girl here in Providence the night before last who has inspired me quite a bit.  In a sense she admitted the ugly truth of life in the voice of someone who is unwilling to submit to 'the way things are'.  People who have wanted money have found it and those who have sought god have found it.  I will always return to hope in people, tried or not.  There will be love in good people, shock and tingling feelings of a joy that is enough to handle.  I will have my real-life Hank Moody experiences. I will have a cigarette.

Vacation

I awoke in Connecticut on Tuesday with the fashion of a traveler.  No questions asked, just get up, find the shower, find the coffee, read until somebody shows up or wakes up.  In my childhood I might have missed home maybe once or twice but since as far as I can remember there has been a comfort in adventure - knowing that if I can survive in this new environment for today I must be able to survive it another.  But this is just a small trip and one night.  Jerrod, our part-time resident at Agape, is driving me to Providence where I have been waking up the past two mornings.  Kate gets off work at 6:00 and I was in at 1:30 so I drop by a Starbucks and buy myself an overpriced sandwich and coffee.  I figured five hours of surfing the web here wouldn't be so bad but my computer is broken in such a way that I have to hold the power chord down with my coffee in just the right way so my laptop stays charged.  Of course every time I take a sip of mocha I have to rearrange the chord again.  Eventually I drank enough coffee that my cup wasn't heavy enough to do the job, and people behind the counter were giving me funning looks for being so poor and making a home for myself at their table.  So I decided to leave.  My back hasn't been that great lately - an old injury reborn - but I managed to heave my duffel and backpack on in a reasonable manner and head towards Fox Point from Brown.  I was still too early to creepily sit at Kate's doorstep so I walked down hope street till I hit water.  There's a great park with good people on the other side of Highway 195 overlooking Providence Harbor.  I put my bags down and stretched my back.  The scenery was familiar as I had been there several times just four months ago.  I took an hour or so to soak in the moment and the memories.  Four months ago was the last time I remember being unhappy but the time I spent here was actually good by comparison.  I tried to figure out why it is that I feel sad about every memory and place from the past whether it was good or bad or whether I was with a good friend or not.  I got no further than I had with any previous time considering this.  It's one of those problems that even if solved will still leave you sad in the end.  I have been getting back into Nietzsche lately.  He lived his life in a frighteningly similar way to mine up till now.  Though we have our differences he had his philosophies that made life just tolerable enough through inaction, realizing how pain can be used to our benefit.  He once said that he wished that all of his friends and loved ones (which there were few) could be struck with all the tragedies of life, pain and intolerance, suffering.  He had an angsty way of saying he had benefited from overcoming pain and wished for that reward to be with the people he loved.  I think he was close to the point without ever actually having any real joy in his own life.  Before turning from the harbor back to Kate's place I allow myself to see the hurt of memory as it is - a glitch that can't be fixed.  I spent most of yesterday cleaning house, a blessing I must say as I had little else to do, and then rested up with reading and a few shows online.  It looks like today I'll walk around the area looking for possible jobs.  Retail is the easiest to shop for but I'll keep and eye out for shadow jobs in Craigslist.  I need to update my resume.  The last year hasn't been good for resume building as I have had trouble keeping/finding decent jobs with which to write down.  Agape will be of help.  It has sadly been my longest commitment for a long time.  That's quite alright with me today.  I'm leaving the past in it's miserable state and deciding to worry less about where I will be and how I will live.  I may end up homeless and I may end up rich - that will happen as it may - I know I am of enough worth that my life will not end up as Nietzsche's.  I've already had insanity, friends are better.

Easier to Face It

There has been a solitude and quietness in the house today and yesterday that has been missing in the community for the last several weeks.  With quiet comes thought.  Thoughts of the people in the past and present and wonderment of who will be there in the coming years.  I wanted to say some things about the people I have known and the moments we have shared over the years, how they have molded almost expressly who I am, but it's difficult to write about people you know.  Easier to know nothing of what a person thinks of us than to know that we might be hated, or even loved.  So I will pass on the shared moments for now.  Let those be reserved for the times I become an old man and reminisce of good and tragic times.  In loneliness, however, there is no emotional attachment but unto ourselves.

Being alone is not altogether a lonely thing.  In fact we crave solitude when we have had a busy day at work or been around a large group of people, feel exhausted or unclean.  It's a time to collect ourselves internally and externally.  People like me prefer to be alone during particular activities (cleaning, reading and running) while feeling the need to have others around during other actions (sleeping, eating and constructing).  Others might feel the exact opposite.  It's clear that on these occasions we act alone or in groups according to natural instincts of regularity.  But the pain of loneliness is a more touchy subject and one I would like to discuss here.  One word cannot describe the angst one goes through when others aren't around.  We tend to feel at a distance from personal touch, conversation, compassionate love, reason, protection, agreement, disagreement, etc.  It's not that hard to figure out that to solve our emotional distress we must have someone around.  Maybe we need to eat with someone, talk to them, have sex with them, play a game with them.  Fill in the missing links.  It is the WHY that perhaps needs a little understanding.  Humans have had a long history of selfishly presuming they are the center of the universe and that there is an external reason for why we are anything - in this case, social.  But quite a few animals and even plants have been known to survive purely by social networking or symbiotic relationships.  So why do we think we are any different?  Is it the consciousness of knowing we are anything?  What is this consciousness?  Are we any different for having experienced loneliness than would any other solitary being?  This is the reasoning that makes the most sense:

Lee Siegel was a professor of religion and talented magician, an expert on the street magic of India.  In his book, Net of Magic, there is a passage where he says, ""I am writing a book on magic," I explain, "and I'm asked, Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No" I answer, "Conjuring tricks, not real magic."  Real magic. In other words refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic."" Magic is not a bag of tricks and when we are told the truth of how a trick is done we are instantly disappointed.  We love to be mystified. Same with consciousness.  We like to think there is mystery to our minds, that it cannot be understood without adding an ethereal component beyond the trillions of cells that make up our selves.  Our consciousness is not as wonderful as we think.  Our minds, our memories, can fool and inflate what we know.  Our consciousness can change blue cars into red and add events and time to anything, even if it only happened moments before.  Darwinian evolution speaks volumes to why we feel the particular way we do that makes us think we're special.  Experiences of beauty, sadness, peace and frustration, like loneliness, can be reasoned with significant clarity.  To be alone insinuates in our minds having broken from a community that is necessary to our survival.  As simple as that?  Science has reworked the notions of existence based on simple decisions made over and over again millions of times to create something that is seemingly complex but at it's root is quite incomplex.  What would that knowledge do for the individual soul figuring a way out of their angst?  Perhaps nothing and something at the same time.  Our emotional response is both a necessity for our present evolutionary state and a nuisance held over from millions of years of selection.  If we were not pulled toward one another in the past we would not have survived as 'sapient' hominids.  Today we have a much greater chance of survival but at what cost to our minds?  Every break we take from our natural direction in history creates glitches in our psyche.  We are not use to pushing so forcefully against what we have been for hundreds of thousands of years or more.  During these months in the woods, working with my hands and living often in direct account of my days work, I have understood much better the reasons for simplicity in our lives.  It only makes sense with the rest of natural history.  If you are hungry, eat, and if you are bored, make or work play.  If you are lonely then endure the residual effects of millions of year knowing that your pain is only there for the sake of your survival and the survival the brief history that will be man and woman.

Margarine vs. Butter

It's the end of the day now and I'm laying in bed looking back and forth from my laptop screen and a luminescent scattering of stars peering in from the window above me. The window is slightly cracked, shut enough to keep in the warmth but open enough to hear the sounds of nature just out of reach.  A distant hum of a passing airliner rips apart the sight and sound of a peaceful night.  My immediate reaction is to be annoyed at the interruption of this peacefulness so far out from anywhere.  How could somebody be so separate from reality as to build a machine that cuts through the tranquility I was experiencing?  All this technology must go - we must go back to the beginning!  But I am just as quickly reminded of my own ignorance.  Without such imagination and technology I would have little hope of being here and of going anywhere.

These are the pieces of confusion I have been trying to fit together since as long as I can remember.  What is the utopia everybody imagines in daydreams and love-lusts? So long I worried about the actions taken in life.  Is my life in line with god's enough to make it to paradise, to heaven?  Will my parents discipline me today even when I try so hard to be perfect for them?  Will my friends today be my friends tomorrow and should I change my life so that all I want comes true?  What is right?  What is truth?  But as it turns out a lot of people have the same existential crises and my own uttering of questions about life become just as annoying as the next persons.  When a visitor to our community pulled out several sheets paper towel for his lunch I gasped inwardly in horror at the outrage of using bleached tree pulp for a minute sum of dribbled soup.  At least, to my comfort, I immediately laughed at myself for being so sensitive to a folly so small.  Where is the line drawn then?  Is it between using paper towels and not buying shoes made from cheap, foreign, child labour?  In a thousand years will it really matter?  Does the current of human nature change for the better when the mass percentage of humanity craves what ultimately destroys itself?  That is a frightening thought.  Some of us are outraged that America is still taking innocent lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We are infuriated that the last Republican in office entered these wars and disquieted that the Democrats before and after him made exactly the same decisions.  But if going to war was not left up to congress but to the decision of each individual American would it have been the same?  The masses are not as reasonable as we would like to think.  Stable women and men may have the ability to see goodness in any kind of human but in the end the world is getting larger, more populous and fast-paced, and the opportunity to create hell for others is growing.    My community thinks in non-violent ways about every facet of life and they do a pretty good job of it too.  No murder of any kind, not in war, not in judgement, not even for the non-human.  Live small, simply and local.  Don't raise a fist not even your voice.  This is wonderful and a pleasure to live amongst.  Despite this I do not think that the endeavor to spread this message will ever be taken seriously.  I do not even think that it will be heard at all by most.  Jesus Christ, the man, taught a message of pacifism and peace, sparking a radical following.  Though, within just a few hundred years this small group of people (just as groups are springing up now) became large and the message was lost entirely.  Even today the majority of Christianity, Catholic, Protestant, Schismatic and otherwise is dismally opposed to the voice of their originator.  This is just an example of many revolutions throughout time.  In the United States the view is just as foggy as it is anywhere. The airplane breaking my nightly silence is barely a breath of the problems surrounding us.  We think about how technology will solve our problems.  How can we get a car to run off of the sun?  How can we reestablish the housing market?  How will we pay off our student loans?  But the questions are just as foolish as the makeshift answer that leak from them.  Truthfully, there is no solid answer.  The problems were overlooked before even asking the questions.  Why must we have cars in the first place?  Why do we buy homes too large and too expensive, bought with money nobody has?  Why do we have to work in jobs we hate till we die to pay off an education we never use?  Many see that there is something wrong.  Some of them even understand why.  Fewer still can feel the futility of that truth.  Do we bail or hold on to childish hope?  We don't know.  Of course we don't know if by crossing a street we will be hit and killed by a car either.  I'm not taking the chance.  Hope is for children, but I still wish upon falling stars.  There is no longer adults, only adolescents making the best of a time soon to be over.  I will not bother arguing over pointless questions of religion or politics or economy or happiness.  Not unless I see you as a friend anyway.  After all I am a human nature, one that gets lonely.  One that also rambles.  There is a time for coffee and a time for philosophy.  On occasion they are at a time the same.