Godleaf's blog

"Principality"

 

I opened my eyes to the sound of glory tearing in screeches overheard. A rolling orb of grotesque beauty came into shape, this was that form. It ripped into the sky above me. Fading into the space like a picture focusing into resolution, birthing itself into the universe. A great gasp, no a yawn wavered and shook the world around me. I trembled on my knees, craning my neck back, fixing on the spectacle. The sight alone was heavy on my being, dragging to my face, attempting to hold my breath, everything was lost.

I was nowhere, flattening out, breaking apart. I scrambled to pull myself together, overcome with a sensation to shatter and cast myself up to the breathing moon swimming there, now a leathery scale twitching. Everything pulled at me, welled inside me and rushed to sink from beneath me. Tears sprang from my face and fluttered to wisps, words bloomed out of my neck, couching out, down between my blackening finger tips, splashing back up in the sounds of screams, only to fall again, disappearing in the hazy drift beneath. Terror split me, it reached into my pit, daring I braved its icy grasp or fall back to the ground. Lost in the misty vertigo down there. Shivering and slipping, pieces of me tore from around me as horns bellowing quaked and shuttered the air. It seemed an eternity, blurring into a recent memory that just past. Then, right then, I knew I gifted up fear of paralysis.

 Maybe this was hell, the second coming of Christ but those too became memories of something long shaken. Chaff, left behind with the fear, desire and thought. A bleating raise sweltered like heat from a midsummer day pavement. Rolling down like a sympathy of  honeyed light, unraveling rays broke the space around. Shifting greedily they squeezed and prodded, jabbing and pushed us. Punching down just at the edges, each stroke was like a wrestle of clarity and there, as the leaching arms slithered back and around, we recognized the behemoth before us. It’s being peered out and in at the same moment, a rolling churning over and over consuming and birthing from its tail to its mouth and mouth from around it tail.

 A blinding urge, surge of glory and exclamation ran through us, as a cupping embrace seemed to glide about us. Gushing admiration and comfort dueled with rapturous glee, bouncing like cracking thunder intimately. “You have come home now.”Opening up a shuttering of relief, it broke and there before us was the principality. She was cold and greeting, spattered with purpose and conviction. All that remained was frenzy and awe.

Ouroboros: Ma'ta and Chaos

 

There is a strange ring of truth in the argument surrounding the universe’s nature. Metaphysically or even physically a contest between order and disorder, as the ancient Egyptians had it Ma’at and Chaos. Maybe we are experience the fringe elements of a de-raveling series of well organized mechanisms. Is it possible to see all of existence hinged together along a clockwork of powers, principalities and possibilities. Finitely packed into all of possible and impossible realities but just outside of that is the ever encroaching doom of chaos. A blanketing unspeakable void which permits or provides anything. Like a wrapping nothingness that does nothing but lingers on the edges of possible existences.

                It is a provocative notion that millions of ancient Egyptians for centuries believed that all of existence and non-existence was summed up in these two dualities. From the little I know there spoke of these monoliths of everything and nothing as active being. Is it possible there is a very pertinent and ancient authenticity to this arrangement? Would it be far to liken the ideas to matter and antimatter? Or does the notion of antimatter fall under the preview of structure and order due to its existence responds in accordance to universal structure, in turn allowing for it to be acknowledged, measured and registered? Is it in our very fiber to want to understand and align to both, if not one of these phenomenons? So in Order every part of our being plays a construct to another piece of this nearly infinite clockwork mechanism. Ashes to ashes and the rest, but imagine that even the electrons the fuse our atoms were stitched from the tumbling of every other electron and neutron that has ever existed. And in turn we further add a minute pittance of that swimming dance, till time ends. Will that be the point chaos consumes everything? When all the music stops and the dance spins to a still, will there be nothing. Such as the idea that out of nothing came something and back to nothing something will go. A cycle, circle of existence from birth to destruction and rebirth. If we knew the nature of the universe would we be able to place ourselves in it?

                Ouroboros, the serpent of the renewal process.  

I Want to be Free

I want to be free. Free from fear, from self condemnation. Free from the worries and pain that exist at the bottom of me or better that haunts me from the past. The parts of me a responsible healthy emotional being must find peace in and rest from. I have been aware for years that I must settle these issues and insecurities for years but never opened myself to the answer. The answer that I have discussed, distorted and masked from others and myself.

                I am a homophobe. I am afraid of homosexuality because it represents multiple episodes in my childhood which I had been led to believe were normal, situational or consensual, but they were not. I was molested by my male cousin 7 years the senior, when I was 6 years old. 

                Experiences that I never remembered as violent or aggressive, abusive or damaging but they were. I was left with a mind that I was not a victim but a participant and have made little effort to ever accept that I was a victim. It is hard to think of it in those terms let alone imagine it that way. I grew up investing years thinking that I was ok with the incidents but I was possibly a homosexual also. Never allowing myself to accept that it was imposed upon me.

That I was not and am not a homosexual but a product of deviant actions which happen to be homoerotic. I was abused and violated, a complex idea and experience that I have yet to fully understand let alone unravel in terms to what that means to me know, those confused and frustrated years of my mid teens and the anger of my adulthood towards the idea of being a victim to anything. But I was, I am a victim and a product of that violation of trust by a male who I should have been able to trust. An incursion into my development that has plagued all past and present deep trusting relationships with male peers, men and other human beings.

                A struggle to trust and invest that has led me to consider that there has been something intrinsically flawed within me. An inability to be comfortable around men and people. A fear that I will be victimized again. An attitude, mindset and lifestyle I cannot afford to live as an adult. I cannot continue to have unhealthy, imbalanced relationships in which I hide for fear of a non-violent, non-intrusive abuse of a relationship dynamic because I am not a child. I am a man and I am capable of having healthy functioning trusting relationships with all people.  As that adult I cannot be a victim to my own judgment, mistrust and fear of being abused by a trusted friend, peer or mentor. 

                I have spent the last 28 years living through various stages in reaction of my non-traumatic/destructive past. It is as an aftershock that has shaped the landscape that have raised my cattle on, never fully accepting that something massive has occurred before I really knew it. A history that has defined me through my relationships with others and I want that power back. I want to define myself to be who I want to be. I want to be free to be me. I am ready to be free.

The Finite, The Serpent, The Tempest

This is going to sound crazy and maybe it is. In the search for meaning a purpose in my life, in humanity and in the human shared experience, I’m forced to think “There has to be more to this universe and more to this whole thing.”
I am an atheist but I can’t deny my deep seated desire for the unified experience of humans, of nature, of the universe to exist and mean something. Its seems to me so misguided to believe that: I am detached from the people around me, the food I eat, the water I drink, the waste and energy I pick up and put back into the world. I believe I am in a sea of finite things, emotional bandwidths and energies swarming around me and between everything, like an ocean of radio waves but made of existence and experience.
Over the course of my short life I have gravitated to an appreciation of a few things. A few ideas that really support my budding animism;
• One is a thought of collective cohesion (Ibn Khaldun’s Asabiyyah).
• Second are the emblems, the runes, totems, hallmarks connected the “the serpent” and “the tempest”.

This most likely is all in my head but I think that’s the point. That these points (emblems/concepts) are where my individual mind, a piece of the grand historical collective though out “the web of existence”, strongly intersect which those other pieces of the grand assembly. These ideas, concepts that meant some many different things to different people at different times, grow to hold general associations and characteristics. I would even argue to the point where peoples past and present have exalted those ideas to godhood; such as Retribution to Jesus, Righteousness to Allah, Community to Yahweh. I believe we have given names to these concepts and not the other way around. So when a person worships Jesus they are really resting their unfounded belief and hopes into forgiveness and retribution. And in no way am I advocating religion or deism, just an approach to the long standing desire/need for the spiritual-religious pulse in the human mind. While in atheism there is an exultance of rationalism, relativism and humanity that almost sacred places in the atheist mind.

The Serpent (Ourobous). A process of self discovery through self consuming dialect, where everything is questioned, mulled over and digested. A state of reflection that indulges on information, which is taken in, broken down for its relevant points of reference to the greater sense of self and then allowed to linger. Maybe to be re-consumed later or lost and referenced later when needed. “Know thy self.” But within this concept there is a sense of distrust. A validation to question everything and take nothing for granted because everything changes over time, through experience and through existence. It edges on the idea that “nothing is sacred.” That all aspects of self and consciousness are subject to be consumed by The Serpent.

The Tempest, a sense that all things change and must change. Things are washed over so something new and fresh can replace the other, built of the ashes of the old. The Tempest for me generally exist in the external realm, where the physical world must go through a transformation, that nothing out here remains or is allowed to remain forever. Even the ground, air, seas, planets, solar systems and galaxies are spinning in an almost ritualistic cycle of eventual destruction and renewal. Not in the nihilistic sense but the natural progression or all reality. Neither created nor destroyed but transferred during the process of The Tempest.

"I have doubt"

    I’m floating in my mind a conversation of doubt, doubt of my conviction to atheism. Doubting the idea that I can possibly have a strong comprehension of my existence. There is a creeping, sometimes flooding sense of “what if’s?”. Feelings that I sometimes dismiss as a plaguing human urge from a youth of theological brainwashing. Or maybe these ifs come from my repeated experiences of accentuated emotional bursts colliding with an ever expanding cerebral process to comprehend my emotional experiences and my existence in its totality, my life which seems to be without an overarching meaning.
   

    I have a  feeling that there is something outside my explanatory scientific worldview. What if that ideology is just a very convenient box to rest my mind in? A place which has allowed me to become cognitively lazy. A mental space which innately isolates me from the possibility of a spirit of a divine. Ancient human tradition, which I was very comfortable believing its just humanities attempt to understand reality as a holistic terms. An immature mind within a limited body, trying to places its self around the vastness of intra space, the world and even outer space. A heritage of belief in the divine and struggling attempt to capture the unknown beyond the five receptors the human body. What if there is something to my feelings, emotions, a sixth senses that is not based in touch, taste, hearing, smell or sight? Like the uncanny feeling of someone standing behind me or feeling as if someone is looking at me. That emotional trigger of interconnectedness from deep moments of empathy. What if I am living in a soup of infinity and have no cultural training to recognize it but am only left with my “feelings”.  My “sensing” as pulse or a grasp of sentimental energy that reaches out through that soup, that ocean of unified amorphous energy for “something”? What if there is something above or beyond, even around us here in this finite dimension that is infinite and all encompassing? Could that “something” be the meaning of existence, the meaning of life? Is this the basis of theologies? Not just the growing pains of death anxiety but the sense or want to reconnect with that marriage of infinity that is all around us?

Green Light

His eyes strained to peer down the worn and tattered dark hall way. It was a filthy, shadow coated passageway. Cluttered with black oblongs shapes and mulled color breaks along the ground, all folded under the murky darkness that filled the corridor. The hallway stretched all the way down the old, crumbling building, which the man stood in. The dimly lit area was shaken like a snow globe, with fat globs of dusty chaff drifting through the air. A wafting starchy smell of mold hung just above his nose as he edged further into the darkness. Stained carpets clotted with thick dirt, finally turned a colorless textured brownish black. It peeled and frayed along its right hand corners, running the length of the narrow pathway. The crusted fabric crinkled and grinded with each step, crunched under the rubber soles of the man's dark leather boats.

Droplets collected like dew beads on the man's unblemished face. Even in the heat and humidity the man's complexion was smooth and even. It was a humid midsummer dusk and the sun was exhaling its last few moist huffs onto the Earth. It was a wet heat that turned this wooden hovel into a hot box, sapping dampness out of everything in the building, whilst it basted and broiled under the setting sun. Runs of watery sweat trickled down from under the man's large puffy brush of hair. It was a twining mini afro, four or five inches off his scalp, a week or so from another buzz to clean up stubble growing past his hairline.

He creped further down into the dilapidated house, second guessing each inch he made down the warped path. Pock divots and rips along the walls showed old gray sheet rock from under light red paint. Pigment struggling to retain its color at spots. A red paint which had long been victimized by the drain of time, the corrosive inching of growing black mold and the laundering of even more cancerous figures, lurking off in the house's dark corners. Figures that the man was searching for, looking for hunting tonight.
It wasn’t his first night out dredging the depths of poverty for vile things, or even his first time alone in a ugly dank place but tonight there was apprehension in the streets. He was on to something tonight, he felt it inching towards him as he left the bar for the corner, the corner for the pay phone and the pay phone to this street. Everyone and no one was talking about this house, the neighbors gave an uneasy pause when talking at it. He caught how their eyes darted towards it when asked if they had known anything about the missing children. How their mouths wanted to say the words and their callous hearts softened just for a second. It was here, he knew. Right here.

Here inside the red walls, which you could find at a once child friendly late 80's fast food restaurant, subconsciously urging it's diners to feverously consume, re-buy and devour more "salty grease on a flesh". Here was nothing child friendly or living friendly. Here the greasy odor that lingered just under the nose was the nauseating smell of smoldering crack cocaine like doughy chalk mixed with a watery diarrhea tinge from the junkies who had even been scared away from here.

It was an old student housing unit that was foreclosed on a decade ago. Now it sat in squalor, boarded up, suffocating in its own stale, dust clouted air. The community kitchen was now wrapped in inches thick cobbing and it was nervously avoided by the local druggies and squatters who used to keep up small portions of the house. They ignored the molding death which swallowed all the breathable air. They suffered the swampy thick gassy atmosphere for a place to escape the soaking southern rain, winter freezes and baking red hill heat of Atlanta. This was the forsaken place the middle aged man found himself minutes after sun down, tucked in anxiety. His palms balmy, his body puckering with salty adrenaline, that held to him only by the nervous chill that hummed under his skin.

A warm buzzing rolled over his ears from the center of his head. A tingling flush of nerve pulsed out of his skin, caught under his light green flak jacket, the heat coursed back into his chest and plumed back up to his head again. Adrenalin pumped through is body, down his arms, out to his pulsating finger tips. Each digit stretched tight around his four pound silver revolver. Its weight laid heavy into his shoulders, ten minutes in the den of squalor and he had yet to lower the weapon or rest his body from the two handed clinch. He held the fire arm ready to shoot for those ten minutes and in that time he had yet to taken a full breath. Each inhale was a thin and wispy pull. Each release would begin to leave his mouth naturally till it was abruptly constricted, halved by the fear.

A dread that pulled at his judgment and thoughts. The wind moaned out like tormented bodies locked in the walls. Bending frame beams and shifting sounds registered as lurking lunatics attempting to cloak their approach. Figures darted from the edge of his vision and white eyes in shadow, shut black when he focused his sight on them. Even his body was lost in the maze of brooding fret. Crawling beads clattered right under the surface of his dark skin. Their prong tipped feet pinched his arm hairs and forcing them to stand on end. Step by pain staking step, he sneaked in further. Deeper into the mouth of the house and further away from his window frame exit, which now stood etched in blackness by the drifting light from a set sun.

His imagination wondered off;
picturing himself finishing his sweep of each room. Clearing all the shambled cubicles, each polluted with driftwood tokens from an ocean of passing years. Moppy old cloths sprawled everywhere, decaying personal effects sunk into the floor and trash washed up in each room. Congealed nylon blankets stuck to cemented carpets laying feet from withered and warped text books. Bent and burned spoons littered the far corner of the second room, alongside mashed food canisters and a gutted mattress. He envisioned himself tentatively scanning each of the rooms in front of him, all but the last one. The room that stood forebodingly thirty feet in front of him, in his day dream and reality. A green tinted glow cascaded out into the hallway from the room, his mind said "go", his body .....

His imagination leapt to him standing in that entry way, his black skin covered in a sheen of emerald light. The gloss was seeping out from a strangely suspended bulb, hanging from a ceiling fan. Its color and tint was filtered out by cakey dead gunk. A malty green growth that crept all the way down from out the shadows of the slimy cracked ceiling. Wet and sticky the moldy moss, melded over the still arms of the fan. It oozed in lumps and voids from inside the fixture, slithering all the way down and around the light. Engulfing the entire bulb, it seemly consumed the all whiteness of the dangling bit of light, allowing only the murky green pigment shine from under its grime.

The adventurer stood planted, mortified at what he saw. The naked back of a hulking beast, gorging itself on the decaying entrails of one of its many victims. It was hunched but feet from the man, in the room’s corner. Its back arched heavily near its shoulders, leaving the convincing impression the beast was headless for a second. Dirty matted gray hair, clumped and tangled run patterned across the length of the creature's body. The monster curled over itself, deceptively compact, its arms and legs tucked under the trunk of its torso, as it grasped the body of pale little body. The bloated remains of a seemingly beautiful little girl dangled ridgedly from the beast's claws. Her dead gaze peered over the creature’s bulbous right shoulder, as her head rocked back and forth, to the reeling thrash of the beast’s bite. Her face transfixed in horror, shaped with elegant rounded cheek bones, a narrow poised jaw line, ending at a softly dimpled chin. A model, a junior pageantry finalist, a damsel who never found fame in the news media, looked out to the man in the door frame. Her eyes, her eyes were gone like all the others. In their place were blackened sockets, hollowed out. Inside them were pits of emptiness, which passed on forever into each dark cavity. The man’s lungs seized, the air in them thinned out as he noted her small face were as beautiful and as they were dead.

His calves clutched and his hands tremored. His bodied shuttered for seconds trying to jump start his mind to comply. The oxygen in his chest had just about been spent as he took in her skin over her collar bone. It was a crusted slab from the deluge of blood that sprang and drained from the gaping tear the child’s neck. A terminal wound that nearly decapitated her. Within the gash; moist innards gelled and tarred by the oxidizing air. Sheering teeth makers lined from just under her porcelain jaw line, to the dry waxy skin covering her bare chest. The man’s ribs burned acidic, each portion of him tearing at his body for a breath but the wound. Full and possessing, his imagination clang to its size and savagery. No man only a monster could have done something this.

Chunks and bits of gristle skin, sinew and unknown splatter lay caked underneath the girl's carcass. The beast tattered and rent the remaining husk of decomposing flesh. It made a wet sloshing sound, like the sound of a dog eating canned dog food. It buried its face over and over again, biting, ripping and swallowing, all in continuous jutting yanks and pulls.
With a driving push, all the man’s organs break out and prying open the his mouth, quickening a flush of air. Sounding a quick gasp of a hiccup.

Alerted, the savage creature whips its snouted face around, lathered in greasy black blood, back towards the man in the door. Its head, its face was unconceivable. Its eyes were hollowed out puss crusted sockets which stared deep into at him.
Soaking the man in fear, his breath once again constricted.
With a mesmerizing gaze beaming heavy into his chest, a gripping dread squeezed the man’s heart. Sweat and courage milked from his brow, dripping over his eyes as he stuttered. The monster snarls its grated maw, lifting its tattered lips, revealing rows of gnarling blades. Some teeth like wedges thick and serrated sloshed with dank rust colored filth and fleshed tarter. The bottom jaw was a mangled field of sharp angles and juts, flooded with juices that drained out from its mouth. The man stands frozen, a washed in swarming blushes of brain farts, blips, deadening fear and terror. His mind dreamt him paralyzed as the murderous monster stalked forward, pouncing furiously onto him, instantly leaching to his face, bowling his eyes out with its purple barked tongue.

Tapping scratches sneaked out beside him, breaking the day dream, pulling the man back the real horror of the crack house and its long dreggy hallway, which he was nervously returned to. To that dank hallway he was inching his way down. On the exposed floor boards, between the carpet and wall, a brawny rat scurried to the only open doorway at the end of the hall. The vermin's dark brown body bubbled and deformed under a hazing green light that bled out from the room at the end of the hall. He composed himself under a few sharp half breaths and tightened his grip around the steal gun grip. The textured grip was now warm and slippery in his balmy nerves. His stomach wrenched slowly to the left as a strange silence took the house. The sound of his weary breath filled the space around him. Startling he thought, how loud his exhale seemed but he resisted the urge to hold it in. He slowed his next draw in to a whisper. He stood still, reaching out with his ears to picture everything, something, anything that was around him, hidden in the dark voids of the old house.

Moaning bends of the structure slowly groaned and stuttered out around him as the wind blew against the abandoned two story building. Struts popped as decade’s old wood leaned and bits tore from the sides of the structure. It was poorly constructed for its era and it was a marvel the building was only partially collapsed in.
The gritty light from the far end of the hall split the thick darkness around it. A green haze pierced through the slinking shadows that stood ready to ambush. The light reflected off specks of brown particles which swim out of the room, wafted on an unseen breeze of tension in an unnerving spin, aroused by something. Something in the room. The bearded man tightened his jaw, grinding his bottom molars against the base of his skull. Slowly, he swallowed down the chalky film that had covered the back of his tongue, smacking his lips a little. Taking a full deep breath, his chest expanded. His mind cooled as he eased out his exhale. His vision brightens and the shades in front of him seem to shrink. He repeated.
His thoughts settle on the one fact that all the S.W.A.T's talk brought him to this house. There was something murdering children in his hood. The police couldn't protect them or wouldn't. Something that was on this block and this was the one of the last two to be checked. And twenty min after dusk something needs that dim green light to see and someone that breathes. Someone, who he was going to find and shoot dead, tonight.

January 3

    Into a new year and I wonder how much this year will change the world. Will it be anything like 2011? Where the world was truly spun into revolt of the norm? When the tinkering of a fine tuned money making business machine found its gears clunking against each other, without the visceral gelling of money, the joints of the ever expanding poor and powerless of America have blanketed the land.  Not uncommon to the plight of blacks in America, now the wave of usury and mistrust are seeping all round. Like Stockley Carmichael said “If they don’t want to deal with the generation of Martin Luther King Jr., then they will have to deal with this younger generation.”

                If the rationalizing of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a message of economic justice/economic rights, by the average American is not taken seriously, will there a second generation that refuses to take economic abuse and misappropriation of money and resources to the needs of the many?  Unlike the civil rights movement of black Americans, this is a vast movement of poor and marginalized people, in a modern world that argues that you are product of your labors. That only lazy and un-ambitious people are poor and in turn add little to society (business society) they get nothing back from society. In spirit of the American ideal, “Where is the democracy in this social contract?” Little spoken but easily understood, the Civil Rights Movement was an economic reform movement. These were and still are poor people coming out of dire situations, violent situations “The greatest form of violence is poverty.” said Gandhi, demanding greater equal access to social currency and that greatest medium of America is dollar.

Here we are almost 40 years later with people redefining their economic position in America. Looking at 30 plus years of wage stagnation and overt corporate corruption of our local, national and international political structure are more and more Americans starting to feel like second class citizens?  From Sit-ins to Occupies, are there deeper lessons to be learned about modern day American youths and the 60’s Civil Rights Movement?

I’m angry! I’m very angry! I’m super angry! And I’m lost in that feeling. So what’s next? Where do I go with this? How do I feel like this and continue on? But what am I angry at? What is going on in my personal life, the community around me and the world I live in that I’m so angry at? Well I’m not too sure what am going on. I’m confused. I have been bombarded with all these ideas to the causes and directions of my personal, social and global failings. Am I caught in a sub racist social regime? Or am I just a lowly wage slave chugging through my consumption super capitalist cycle? Maybe im an unwitting fool stuck on a simple minded quest to develop my personal self esteem and general happiness world view.

December 23, 2011

And like the beauty and grace of the rising sun, life goes on. A night out to celebrate a friends claim on another completed year of life, I woke up next to my sun. Next to the young woman who has me placed some much in perspective, like that brilliant ball that glides across the sky, her love helps keep me focused on what matters at this moment. It’s so easy for my mind to get lost in the darkness of question and mystery but she like those other beating living breathing emblems of reality pulls me back to Earth. Now I go back to work, back to rallying call of my class and make money, enjoy the moment and try be comfortable…..but the winds will surely change and ill find myself back following the serpent, guided by the sun.

December 22, 2011

With the Christmas here and that good ol’ holiday nostalgia working its magic, it caught me by surprise when I stopped and noticed how little holiday cheer there really was. From yesterday where I walked through my local shopping center, one of the many Christmas/Chanukah deal scroungers, it came to me. It was a benign feeling that the holiday season, like our winter here in New Jersey, had never came. Like global warming to the traditional weather of this time of year, all that Christmas joy seemed to be drowned out by a flood of economic gloom and social protest. While Time crowned its Person of 2011 as “the Protester”, report after report about how incomes haven’t gone up over the last 30 years and 1 out of 2 persons in American considered poor or low income, whatever it was, something was missing. In the mall, I was part of a crowd it seemed to be walking through the traditional motions. It was all off, a far shadow of Christmas’ pasts. It was really strange.
Later, while flopping through the NON holiday addition of Esquire Magazine, entertaining the ridiculous question of if I should be a 3Dtv(could never afford one), I realized that maybe those other shoppers were like me and experiencing this strange luke warm sense of uncertainty. Or better yet like all those “small business owners” who won’t rehire workers because of uncertainty in “the Market”. Maybe we are unsure about what to buy next, where to travel next or even what to do next.
For me the last two weeks have been a dull anxiety about life, about the world, about the future of things. Coming off the last few months of this very charged and exciting poor/working class social consciousness movement by that Occupy Wall Street “thing” to the halting pressure of the crash European debt crisis, maybe others like me are stuck in neutral. Is there a large portion of the American population that is having a hard time transitioning from an alternative narrative that almost vilifies our consumer culture and capitalism to the emotional workout that maybe the future will NOT be brighter than our past? Are we U2esk “Stuck in the Moment and we can’t get out of it”? That things are not going “to take a Turn” but we all facing a long slow draw down from an age of Christmas’ pasts.
My father being nearly 70 years old assures me that these things happen, that in the 70s he entered a job market where his employer at that time only hired 3 out of 45 applicants for his entry level management position. “That these things come and go and I just need to bunker down, thank god I have a job and be smart with my money.” I secretly hope he is right, that six months from now, a year from now, I will be looking back say “Wow, that ish was cray.” And we all will find ourselves in a better situation that the last 3 years. But I’m just not sure.