I Want To Write An Essay. 

Get lost in the night’s machinery

with nothin’ to see but what there is to see

synthetic angel glow and Internet Protocol that never sleeps

Red Pills

Every red pill I ever swallowed

was barely a placebo

dime store salvation

dolled up like nirvana

to get me through the day

to get me through the day

to get me through the day

and some days I came out something like alive

and thought I’m free of the dread

in this dream

none of us chose

but nah

and I’m never getting a refund

for any of those pills

the twisted man

from the internet sold me

so I’ve got a live with it

Improvised trek

into the coldest

and maddest parts

of you and me

and I hope you’ll come with me

into the setting sun

Some people have the ability to manufacture reality for others.

I am not one of those fucking people.

You probably aren't either so we have that in common.

Lot of people just live here.

That's okay.

This is not any sort of earth-shaking revelation but it was apparent to me today that I am capable of expressing myself very lucidly if I try just a little. It’s important for me to not try too hard. Trying too hard will fuck things up. You gotta dance with it a little. You make it smooth. You steer it gently and you make it do what it does. That’s how expression works for me. 

I got into a discussion with the parents about the way the world works, about U.S. foreign policy, about a better world. It wasn’t very long before I got fucking pissed off about their attitude. I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow breakdown of this discussion but the gist of what I kept hearing from them was people can and have tried running the world a different way but those different ways have always failed. The way things get run in this country is not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot worse in every other place on earth you care to name. 

Is that what getting older does to us? We just shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, things will never be perfect but we have it a lot better than those brown people over there who don’t speak English and who get followed around by flies.” 

I am not at all convinced that this is a generational phenomenon. 

This is totally a propaganda thing. We don’t get educated about the way power works. Maybe we go to college and we get a professor who assigns some Zinn or Chomsky and then we forget all that when we go to work to make some asshole a bunch of money. I think maybe something like that is what happens. 

How I Learned to Love the Lord

What follows will be the most honest attempt to date to explore a particular period in my religious history, specifically the period of time where I could be described as an Evangelical Christian.

At the current time, I am a sincere agnostic. I have no idea whether God or any gods or goddesses or supernatural beings exist. Like many people do, when the chips are down and shit is looking bad, I might beseech whatever gods may be out of desperation. I do however have a lingering suspicion that our ultimate reality is spiritual rather than material.

I was raised to be a Catholic. I’ve been to confession. I’ve taken communion. I often got tapped to read from the scriptures at Mass because my voice was clear and deep. I was never confirmed though. On paper, I’m still Catholic. I went through school with largely the same group of kids from kindergarten through about the 9th grade. See, in the 9th grade, shit got a little crazy. I did something I should not have done. To this very day, I don’t really know why the fuck I did it. The best answer I can give you is boredom. You also don’t think too deeply about the consequences of your actions when you’re a teenager. I mean, how the hell can you? I’m told the brain is still developing at that age. Anyway, I wrote up a few bomb threats and emailed them to various students and the principal of the school. I got in a world of trouble. I was suspended and then basically expelled from my school and my teenaged ass ended up getting charged with a Class B felony. This was back in 1999. This pretty much ruined my freshman year of high school. No Catholic institution would let me enroll because of this incident. They did not want to take the chance that I was the next school shooter. You also have to keep in mind that the infamous Columbine High School massacre occurred while my case was making its way through the juvenile court system.

So, there I was. I was a scrawny 16 year old kid who had just been exiled from everyone I’d pretty much ever known. It felt like my fucking world had ended. I was pretty sure I had ruined my fucking life forever because I was a dumb teenage kid who had no perspective. When the time came for my parents to stick me in another school, they found me a small, private school that was run by a local Baptist church. I wanted no part of it. I had seen TBN. I had a pretty good idea of what went on there. This type of religion seemed utterly brain dead to me.

I went. I barely fit in. This was a strange place, man. Nobody ever used profanity. There was no social dancing. Every single textbook was published by a company called Abeka which meant theology snuck into pretty much every subject. The theory of evolution was an Anti-Christian hoax inspired by Satan and man clung to it out of sinful pride. When other regions of the world were discussed, it had to be spelled out in black and white that the dominant religions there were false if that religion happened to be anything other than so-called biblical Christianity. There was also a really right-wing bent to the history we studied. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist and a communist. The Great Depression was greatly exaggerated by communist propagandists like John Steinbeck. It was like going to school in an alternate universe.

I looked around and it seemed like there was a lot of genuine love between people. These people seemed to care about one another.

I’d been in Catholic school my entire life and I saw so much cruelty there. I didn’t see much of that at all among these people. They had something and I wanted it. Holy shit. This seems like the narration for an episode of The 700 Club where a former stripper is about to convert but it’s accurate.

I was a kid. I had made the biggest mistake of my life. It was a mistake that had sent me away from every friend I’d ever made. I hated myself. It was easy for me to accept that there was a darkness inside of me that had driven my actions. Maybe it was my sinful nature. Yeah, it was my sinful nature. I gradually came to believe that Jesus Christ was the answer.

I can recall getting on my knees one night in my bedroom. I asked God for forgiveness and accepted Jesus. I can remember feeling my eyeballs heat up and being aware of a really bright light. I can also recall my ears buzzing. It scared me shitless. I believed I had been saved.

Skip forward in time to today. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect upon what happened. My conversion happened during a personal crisis. The thing about crises is that they eventually pass. What “saves” you in a crisis might not be what you need after it’s all over. Truths that seem iron clad in a crisis might not be so iron clad when you have time to catch your breath and think a little.

Half naked. 

Arms raised like some prophet preachin’ what nobody wanted to hear

but I bleed for ‘em 

so they love me

Get punched. 

Get kicked. 

The more it hurts 

The more they feel it 

that stuff people think is the holy spirit. 

Tightness in the chest 

need bed rest 

but the show must go on 

the roar of the diabetic souls 

that in the night 

tell me not to mix those two things 

gets me through another one. 

Fly to victory 

and then the waiting room. 

https://youtu.be/8hTRb-OQdKU

This track always goes right to my heart for some reason.

“The borders should be illegal instead of the people / That were here before the Bible and all of its sequels.”

It really was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but that reflection I did on Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing was satisfying to me to write. It was scribbled out at work during downtime with a black ballpoint pen on a legal pad that I had swiped at one point to write work related notes on. There was a time where I used to hand write pretty much everything. There was just something about the feeling of moving a pen on the page. There was something about looking at the words I had formed with my own hand and smelling the ink from the pen on the page. That’s part of the writing process that I definitely miss. For some writing, I’m definitely going to return to the pen and paper. 

Sometimes inspiration does hit you. That can be a beautiful thing. It really can be. It arguably hit me at least twice last night. Inspiration can be like love. Love. Sweet love. Dirty love. Dangerous love. Sometimes it can take you to places that you really didn’t plan on going. Sometimes it can take you fucking nowhere at all. 

Thursday

I sit down at my desk, open a Word document and start typing away. Nothing like inspiration has hit me. No burning bush. No getting struck blind with the truth while hearing the voice of God. The office is quiet. I’ve said my good morning to the office manager as is always my custom. She’s a sweet lady.

It occurs to me that what I’m doing here is writing just to get something down. It really doesn’t matter if it’s complete garbage or not. Just do it. Nike that shit.

I sip from my second cup of coffee today. I have one cup of coffee at home, another when I get to work and some decaf in the afternoon while I’m just coasting through the second half of the day (hopefully).

I’ve worn a collared shirt and khakis every single day that I’ve been employed here. I could probably get away with dressing a bit more relaxed but I don’t. Even though I’ve developed quite the disdain and skepticism for authority, I still tend to follow rules. I try to look as respectable as I can even though the idea that someone is respectable due to wearing a collared shirt is almost unspeakably stupid. Maybe I manage to completely undermine my air of respectability by wearing my collared shirts untucked though. I mean, I used to tuck them in but they kept coming untucked so I just wear them untucked.

I’ve been in this habit recently where I sit down at my desk at work and begin writing. I do it “now” instead of waiting until I get home because mostly I fear that I’m not going to have much in the way of motivation when I get home. What I’m aware of when I’m sitting in the office writing is that when I’m doing that, I’ve got the vibe of the office going on. I believe when I’m engaging in this exercise in the office, my mindset is that of the office. There is reservation in my words. I keep myself from going to certain places inside myself because of where I am. Things be calm at the moment, ya dig? Any moment though, that serenity gonna get murdered by a member of the professional managerial class. I’m always thinking about getting interrupted.

Don’t ask me what’s with that 1950s hipster language or whatever that is. I couldn’t tell you.

Heavenly Father

When I lose my religion 

I come to you. 

When hope is just a bitch

Maybe I lose it and I pray. 

I reach for the phone and start dialin’ for parts unknown. 

Heavenly father, 

one more day. 

Have mercy on your boy

cuz he’s for sale 

and he’s last year’s model. 

Have mercy on your boy 

cuz maybe today is gonna be the day. 

Have mercy on your boy

cuz he never asked to come out of that cave 

into this blinding white light screamin’ 

like he knew exactly what the hell was up. 

God damn it. 

Have mercy on your boy. 

Can ya do that? 

If not me, for someone who needs it more. 

Amen.