"What a curious life we have found here tonight there is music that sounds from the street."

"And so this is Christmas."

Last night was the long, lively chain of Christmas Eve services, the finale of which commenced at 11 o'clock in the evening, ending with a royal "Joy to the World" at approximately midnight, making it Christmas day.

The auditorium was packed. Sitting in the front, between my mother and the mother of my best friend, I stood just before the service started and gazed back across the tops of everybody's heads, picking out those that I knew and recognizing with tangible evidence just how God has blessed my life through the people he has placed in the path he has for me.

My spirit soared, gaining new heights of levity that it has not known for sometime. A meal for my soul? A buffet of joy and love, and I took my absolute fill. Biting into the softer meat of substance, I laughed and let the juices drip out the corners of my mouth and down my chin. It was so good to be alive - to know how much I love and am loved - the kicker of "It's a Wonderful Life" - You and you and you and YOU and you too!

Our world is so broken, so tragically broken in so many ways. We are in such need of saving, so incapable of self rescue. Advent and Christmas celebrate the duality of these ideas. The pining wait for a savior and the uninhibited joy celebrating the memory of his arrival.

In a way, the Christmas eve service and the weeks preceding it served as a miniature Advent and Christmas on a personal level. A few weeks filled with a sense of isolation; of occasional sensations of helplessness and fleeting moments of despair, followed by the sudden re-realization of happiness, love, and unity with all those around me.

The loud, musical reminder of my own need for a savior and the fact that I already have him.
What a fitting thing to relearn less than a week before a new year dawns.

If one were to remember how they are loved all the year round, they would truly be blessed indeed. Loved by God and man both -so utterly blessed.

"What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all 'round the sun.
And when we meet on a cloud, I'll be laughing out loud-
I'll be laughing with everyone I see.
Can't believe,
How strange it is to be anything at all."

The Aura Unexplained

I once met a kid who said he could sense other people's auras -the color their soul (essence, personality, identity) gave off. By looking closely he could tell what the quality of your heart was -the ultimate, irrefutable personality test that smells strongly of the spiritual world.

I do not know how much you believe in Angels, Demons, or the roles they play in our lives, but what this guy picked up was closely akin to that. In some, he could sense evil or Godliness. He could feel the negative dark around those who had surrounded themselves with the bad. He told a few of the people we were with about themselves, and accurately.

I did not ask who he perceived me to be -which was odd looking back, considering my struggle to find identity at the time. I would have liked him to tell me who I was -so that I would have some sort of idea at all.

But daily I am figuring out who I am, and aptly.

Would you like to know?
Camus said "No man dares describe himself as he truly is."
Maybe I am as diluted as all that...

None the less,

I know in my core I was destined for something larger than nine to fiveing, paying my pension plan and retiring in Florida. But how many other believers can say the same?

Sometimes I feel strength in my hands that shocks me -the power to change much and many.
Other times I wallow in the mire of despondency, indulge my insecurities, let the moody blues drag me deep, fuel my anger's fire.


I just want to be extraordinary.

Numb-skulled

In those days, your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams...

What I wouldn't give for a dream that would find its roots stretching far and deep, rooted in reality. If only if in the deepest spot in the deepest crack between my dreams' deepest roots there was not dirt of sleeping thoughts but the smallest grain of the deep deep reality.

"For what dreams may come after we have shuffled off this mortal coil?"

If I did not believe in God, I would be as existential as your albino friend. But what to do when those close find themselves slipping their arms from the life vest, doubting if the surface is really where they want to be -asking themselves and others out loud if they can call themselves one of those who do not sink if they truly question the act of floating.

Do I sound drunk? Altered?
Every once in a while I find my sober thoughts are rather similar to drunk ones. Such is the nature of my mind.

I struggle.
It may be a secret.
A secret only kept because I keep to myself -the walls may have ears but I find them indifferent audiences. Mostly I'm afraid of how they talk after I've been hanging with them too long.

I need to get out more.

And now we grab the circus wheel...

My philosophy research paper was assigned 2 months ago.

I had only picked it up every now and then, only to set it down because it stressed me out up until last Friday. Work officially began yesterday at 5 p.m. I took a 4 hour brake at 8:30 to go to Evensong and get coffee with Nick and Kris afterward. Guy talk. I saw it as more important, and I maintain the ruling even now.

Work recommenced, went until 4:00, wherein I finished my works cited page and found myself oddly satisfied despite my C- paper. I was in bed by 4:30, and set my alarm clock to 7:00 in order to get up and do homework for my Com class. Needless to say, I rolled over a few times and it was 8:00. The intervening time was spent in a motley combination of Snooze hitting, mass disorientation and vivid dreams of Sunday School teachers getting into vehement debates over the props i had created for the week.

Some were intensely dissatisfied and demanded changes on the spot because they transgressed some crucial theological issue that their conservative seminary schooling had clearly stipulated against. "No, you don't understand! This is a serious infringement of this or that obscure tenet! We surely cannot say we endorse that theology..."

The other Sunday School teachers maintained that it was not all that serious of an issue, but they had never gone to seminary and were unsure of themselves in this argument.


I know, right?


I woke up, tossed some eggs on the stove, drank some weak tea, whipped through my homework in order to don the same clothes I wore yesterday, not take a shower, and sprint out the door.

Communications was canceled.

But now I have two hours to write, and stare out the widows at the rather pretty snow falling.

As I walked to class this morning, I was alone on the sidewalk. No other walkers or bike riding commuters. The cold has driven them in. When I went outside last night, just to stand out in the 4:00 Eastown morning, I was alone, save for somebody howl-singing a somewhere near and yet distant.

I am at peace.

Grand Rapids sleeps in under thick blankets.

Thought Block

If I were riding the metro rail, the recorded announcing voice would have just called out: "Leaving: Comfortable. Next Stop: The Wire."

Tense, high pitched violins tremble, indicating an imminent attack (under the water's surface/around the corner in the vacant, darkened house)

Sure they were assigned two months ago, but actually working on assignments are for sissies.

Three weeks:
One group project with an essay.
A research paper.

One week:
Hamlet
A Philosophy paper

Need to Do:
Late assignments
Work on my creative writing manuscript
Edit the poop out of a One-act I wrote in time to submit it to CC's semi-annual literary journal
The odd five-page aptitude test for my academic adviser
Apply to Cornerstone
Choose a major
Read my Bible
Pray
Apply myself to everything I do
Worship God
Stay the type of person I could like if I knew them
Occasionally call my friends and remind them how much they mean to me
Bathe.


But music helps.
And I've played so much Tetris in the last 48 hours I can see descending multi-colored blocks locking into place as I read my textbook, or write this.
Concentration is impossible.

My Cousin Dylan

Dylan and I were close growing up. Just a year and a half older than me, we wrestled on trampolines and in basements on Thanksgivings, Christmases and Easters for as long as I can remember.

He was always stronger, always faster, always beating my brother and I in backyard football. In hide-and-seek he was nowhere to be found. He ran cross-country and went to state his Sr. year of High School. Division One.

Funny? I thought he was hysterical. Homecoming King. Popular. Good looking. The girls adored him. He worked at either Abecrombie or American Eagle for what felt like a year in High School -I can't remember which. His graduation open house was more like a block party.

My freshmen year he was close friends with the girl I had a massive, heart-bleeding crush on. I sat in his room one afternoon, slumped in some teenage fit of moodiness, staring at the pictures on his wall of them on spring break together in some tropical location.

Last April I was at the surprise birthday of that same girl -we're friends now. A sister of one her friends went to high school with Dylan, and asked what he was "doing these days."

I told her he was in Fallujah with the Marine Corps -And he was.

This Saturday he came home, safe and sound. I did not know how much I loved him until he came out of his gate, and hugged each family member in turn.

Corporal Dylan Manion, just off a tour of duty with the Scout Snipers. Fresh from the sands of Iraq and freezing in this premature November snow.

We left the airport, my massive family choking the streets in entourage, and ate pizza on a long row of tables in a restaurant in East Kentwood.

Dylan was generous in answering the probings of his Aunts and Uncles, though as a whole somewhat tight lipped. As much can be expected. Between appetizers and the entree he held his baby niece for the first time.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, he will be in Afghanistan before his twenty third birthday come this September.

Though he is safe and out of harms way for the time being, I am worried about him. How he is inside. What wounds we cannot see, and how what he has seen will be processed in time.

While we sat around the tables, eating and laughing as an extended family, celebrating the return of a grandchild, a nephew, a cousin, a brother, and to one of us, and uncle, there was across town a funeral for another veteran of the same war who came home too, but didn't make it after all. I know this because my father was asked to do the funeral and had to say no.

I love my cousin Dylan. Now I pray for him every night.

A long day indeed.

Today a lady read from a book that she wrote. A man, the picture of collection, cried briefly, quietly, at my elbow. And the sun outside shown bright and warm.

I felt the bursting of life I have not felt in a while -my very seams shining light from within.

I heard that my own voice is more than just drops in a well, behind your parent's farm, where no children play anymore. I am grateful for this fact.

But then the bags beneath my eyes sagged a little more, darkening to bruised colors, the way they do. The edge of the wheel, once high above the earth, then in the mud, soon to carry on.

I find that I have recently become a twitcher -a shaker or bouncer of legs when sitting. Once, in an archaic dictionary, I found the obscure name for this action. The "devil's tattoo." Demons playing marching beats to your constant, rhythmic motions.
Big Dan once told me that he rocked his body back and forth because he had pneumonia for 8 months when he was a child, and his tall bodied father would return home from work and use the same rhythmic motions to soothe Dan to sleep. Why do I move the way I do now?

Today we voted. Some cry out in anguish, others in optimism. Some bury their faces, and others lift their eyes up to the light. We project our pictures of God and Satan on human beings so easily. We seem to forget who is in control. We seem to forget who can or cannot save us, body or soul.

For me: I see people fighting in the streets and forests of other countries. Will we be spared from such a fate, such cave dwelling? Here, on our own city blocks, in some future's distant mist?

I wait for my love, my future wife, the one whom will radically change my life.
But I also can see myself dying young, tomorrow, or the next, in a traffic accident, a stray bullet through my apartment's window, an air conditioning unit falling from a window stories above.

No matter the date of my demise, either near or far, before you lower me into the eath, have them carve on the lid of my pine board box:
"How great is the Creator? Who knows what shape I may take, or where I will go, or what I may see there?"
Bury my body beneath a tree that will grow large, so that in time it may lower its roots and cradle me in its loving arms. Me? I will be somewhere else entirely. For, "I have no soul. I am a soul. I merely have a body."

In between

Just a few minute post before the grind of the week begins to grind me up. I am a man on a year-long assembly line, standing at my spot, turning screws and tightening bolts accordingly -hoping all the while it is in fact I who am changed. The weekend is over, but the week has not yet started.

My walls and floors are paper thin. Last night I laid awake while my cousin and her boyfriend watched a movie on a laptop across the hall. The neighbors across the narrow ally from my bedroom kept the party rocking until two. This afternoon I read at the kitchen table, my cousin in the room to my left, and my neighbor in the basement to the right, both talking on phones at the same time, both highly audible, while I read of loneliness in characters so deep the room I was in grew by city blocks.

This is all for now, but a manuscript is coming.

A cough can rattle my chest -and it looks like it's going to get worse, for a week or two.
Causing me to think of all those old romantics, torn apart by TB.

Punctuation, or over doing it for emphases, makes me feel poetic at times.
I've been writing lately, and loving it -but wish I was doing more of it.

I am optimistic of my future, a warm blanket when I am alone at night.
Working with children causes me to want them for my own
-An oddity for a single, 20 year old, boy.
Waiting for my future wife
Like a long distant phone call
In this too, I am optimistic, again, an oddity.

A week ago I felt the snap of Beat Poetry's jazz percussion.
This week I feel tired -and in love-
I value my friends all the greater.

Dave Cope introduced me to Gertrude Stein.
I have never before seen someone write without pain.

At the end of this early October day

Tonight I am tired, and putting off homework to write instead. A near tie, it lags just behind talking with my close friends and dearly loved ones as the foremost action I can take in order to screw my head on strait.
Tonight I am tired, and already logged well over my due 20 hours at the church, and am beginning to fall behind in my school work -tomorrow I shall leave my internship with the Children's ministry early, and play a game of catch up with the classes I am doing poorly in.
Just last year I learned the pleasure of being a good student for the first time. To see my grades hurt now is salt in the eyes and teeth gritted tight.
Tonight we had our first Discovery Village Family Experience (DVFX) of the year. I had a speaking role this time round, and felt the thrills that only theater can afford. Oh, how I miss the medium of acting.
My food will go bad before I can eat it, and somehow this fills me with melancholy. Simultaneously, my battered victim of a wallet only affords the food within my kitchen. Tonight, my stomach is forced to do with cold refried beans; the ones from the can. Somehow this feels a fitting retribution for those suffering from hunger in other worlds.
Nate, the 25 year old who lives in the basement's apartment, is going through a break-up. His typically sunny disposition is soiled and gray. He talks loudly and can be heard through the floorboards at night. He's been drinking too much lately. I realize this is the result of finding your identity in your relationships. It causes me to wonder how I unwittingly seek an empty fulfillment in my own ways. A few obvious answers come to mind.
I am writing a piece of work for my creative writing class. It is a collection of short-short stories, "micro fiction" is the term, I've been told. I am extremely proud of my work. In all my years of reading good and great literature, I feel an extreme sense of accomplishment to think that something, anything, I could ever produce on my own would ever be considered half-way decent by my own standards. Again, I am proud.
But I feel as though I cannot share it with my family, but more so with my father, whom I honor above every other human, and who loves a good book like warm blanket.
What I have written...
It's dirty. And crass. And dark, and at parts disturbing. But it is also autobiographical, and so accurate to my thoughts and feelings, and revealing. Like taking off your clothes in front of a crowd of people who know you and showing them your body as much different than they thought it'd be -with scars and stains from nights they never knew you'd lived.

In all this, I am happy. Life is being lived in a manner I do not think I have grasped it thightly before. I wring it -and it is mine.

"Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes"

I've been listening to that song lately; the one by Paul Simon. "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes." It's carefree and ethnic in the way he does in "Goodbye Rosie,"
and can never fail to serve as a pick-me-up.
"Diamonds" is about a rich girl and a poor boy and how they "end up sleeping in a doorway." Eventually the boy learns to walk with diamonds on the souls of his shoes too, thus "curing these walking blues."
I like to think the song is about learning to live in a state of contentment with the world -and love being the vehicle to help you arrive at that mindset.
And the other day, as I was running into CC, and the skies were gray and it was cold and of the first of the true days of fall, I saw there, on the steps, just in front of the great sets of double doors, a girl curled up and sleeping on the lap of her boy. He was awake and staring out and stroking her hair.
I've seen them a couple of times before, but never without the other. The boy's face is impassive, and looks for all the world like a slightly Asian version of John Lennon behind his small round glasses. The girls face is round, beautiful, and innocent. I have never heard either of them speak.
Curled up in that doorway, they felt in love -both in the way of the very young and the very old, simultaneously.
Sometimes I'm tempted to listen to those who say we can cure this disease that ails man with love alone.
But then I remember that very few people have the capacity to hate with the intensity that former lovers and family members possess. Look at the headlines. Only in extreme circumstances does a brutally murdered victim not know their attacker. Ex boyfriends and husbands. Spouses. Siblings. Step children.
But I'd still like to believe in something as optimistic as love, or the idea of finding peace in the company of another. The fact that we are indeed capable of saving ourselves with our goodness.

But what is "good?" Can you define it by a universal standard?
What happened to the idea of morality? Ethics? These are honest questions.

The other day I actually got in an argument over the sanctity of human life. It was in philosophy class, of all places. It was easily the most worked up I've been in a while; and it truly felt good inside to have a belief actually worth fighting for.
Life is not cheap. The mind body and soul of another human being is no trivial matter. Is it so hard to reach within ourselves and find decency and respect for our fellow man? This is a question apart from my religion.
Relativism cannot give an answer. It cannot cure what ails us. It is watching our house on fire from the front lawn as our children and spouse burn inside with all of our possessions. It is a young man's luxury to hold it in contempt as I do.
But that alone does nothing to heal.
Stitch up our split skin. Our puncture wounds. Our hammered faces.


What can you do?

The sticky truth seeps out between the cracks of my stony surface; a syrup that leaks from some unknown internal break. Its drops accumulate and drip over time, leaving a darkly dotted trail of where I've been, and if read correctly, one may accurately estimate where I'm going. I'm worried about staying in one place for too long -about parking my body in one place until the drops gather to form a puddle, staining the concrete for months afterward. I leave oil stains on carpets and bottoms of chairs all across Michigan.
To combat this, or rather to out run it, I stay on the move. Driving is my favorite method. You can measure the time I've spent in transit by the stack of books on tape I've borrowed from the library and finished. Laying them in a row from beginning to end, I cannot seem to remember all of their titles, but I am certain these are among them: Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy, Treasure Island, Red Dragon, Atonement, About a Boy, Cannery Row, The Lovely Bones. I drive to fill the hours of the day, audible books that I can not access in any other way have become by friend.
All this to say that I have become dreadfully lonely. I feel so isolated. Bloated with stupidity, quick anger, and a cumbersome social awkwardness. I dislike the route my existence has taken- days filled with me trying to fill my hunger for food, entertainment, and seeking company. But the hunger for company cannot be satisfied. I string together a series of acquaintances that remain at a distance -adequately removed from my thoughts and at times, silent desperation.



I hate this.

Only a few more days until

The other day I accidentally deleted a post I had spent the better part of an hour on, just as I was putting on the finishing touches. It was all about my extended family and our shared idiosyncrasies -our eccentricities.
I write this in Denver Colorado while I stay with my Aunt Julie, the far flung colonist of the Manion family. About five years ago she married a good friend of hers. His name is Eric, and on occasion he bears an uncanny resemblance to a government teacher I had in highschool, with the exception of some glaring differences. This is something only a Northpointe Alumni would appreciate.
Kids: imagine a laid-back Mr. Anderson, twenty years younger. Now imagine he's a staunch democrat with a dark tan and an affinity for both sailing and a good bottle of wine. Now understand how hilarious I find the irony in their resemblance.
Colorado has kept me busy, despite the dry heat I find alienating being from muggy old Michigan. I truly am no longer in the Midwest. The people here are significantly more laid back -even friendly. Everybody seems to lead an active life-style. Everybody has a dog. Denver chicks are hot.
But I find myself less apt to think, write and read in this environment. I miss the afternoons of reading that Glen Arbor, and the mornings of poetry in Chicago. Instead my days are filled with trips to Red Rocks, rafting, and mountain biking. I have been traveling for a while now, and have been enjoying myself immensely for the most part.
But I am eager to return to my reading and writing, and my friends whom I have not seen in what seems like ages.
But I also find myself eagerly awaiting the shifts in lifestyle I see as completely voluntary -just another path through the woods that will lead to the road. This all comes with the gradual search for your own identity that in turn comes with moving out and growing up. I am eager to grow. The movement is now.

A few days ago, I left the briefest of posts on my blog for the briefest of hours. It simply contained the lines from a movie I saw a few days ago; words that had stuck in my mind as fodder for thought.
"What do you want out of life, my son?"
"Sorry?"
"What do you want? A shot at the title...or a seat by the band?"
Is the title ours to shoot for, to stand the chance of gaining or losing more than we can possibly imagine? Or are we removed from the ring, cheering or helping those others claim what is theirs? I submit that for now, the only answer I have is the response the character in the movie gave.
"That's a very expansive question."

Spiders in the Sky

It is the fourth of July. The Declaration of Independence, the groundbreaking document that I have never read in entirety, is two hundred, thirty two years old. The good folks at the cable television head-quarters have decided to celebrate by broadcasting some professional wrestling “Smack-down.” I imagine some beefy, steroid laden thug growling “Happy birthday Uncle Sam –get ready for a spanking” before launching himself off the ring’s corner post.

“Choke hold! Get him in a choke hold!” God bless America.

I am in down-town Chicago. My father acquired a condominium from a friend of a friend for his study break and we have joined in the good fortune for the weekend.

We are on the top and seventh floor, and I write this while sitting on the balcony with my sister’s boyfriend. Though our lodgings are for all purposes affluent, we overlook a section of tenements. Two blocks to the north we can see two green grass vacant lots –all that remains of the infamous Cabrini Green projects, where for years gangs ruled and the police themselves were afraid to go. For the present, many blocked row houses are below, to the east, and well lit. Seven stories and one street removes you one whole world. Fireworks and rockets shoot skyward between the buildings, exploding at our eye level some couple-hundred yards away. M-80’s go off with enough force to trigger car alarms and flinches from my father. Hip Hop and R&B is playing loudly, though we cannot tell from where, giving us a soundtrack to read and write to.

The magnificent mile looms over all of this; so well lit in against the black night behind it that it resembles some form of cardboard cut-out or computer generated image too perfect to be real. On the way home from Navy Pier’s fireworks, we passed several nightclubs, complete with red carpets, ropes, and bouncers. We imagined what enclaves of the social elite were permitted inside, and what forms of bizarre, ritualistic, Hellenistic hedonism they engaged it.

The two worlds, filled with two peoples celebrating the same event in their own fashions, did not escape me. Two nations, on either sides of the same fence. First and third worlds, juxtaposed, both seemingly empty, with hardly an individual to be seen inhabiting either. Where did the sea of people we flowed from the docks with disperse to? The flood of people crashed upon the rocks of the city, falling through its cracks. All that remains of them is their noise and their lights in the night sky. The horizon to the west is filled for miles with the ignition of the fireworks of many towns and villages and suburbs. The mass of humanity, sprawled out in this tide pool, seen from above.

Fireworks always remind me of the collected images my brain has stored of war time. Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome taught me that no kingdom can last forever. How will ours end, and how soon? How long will it be until the explosions in the sky mark something horribly different, and people flee at the sight of them? How long will it be until the lights of Chicago are dimmed, and the forests overtake its sidewalks and rooftops –and we all resemble the ruins of Cabrini Green?

p.s. Four Friends, the coffee shop that is a mainstay and institution of Downtown Grand Rapids is closing on THURSDAY. Sadly I will be in Denver, and cannot be at its side when it breaths its last. Remember me to it –I have loved it so. Order a 007, and think of me fondly as you sip its goodness.

We live in Disney World, my friends.

I sit here typing at approximately 9:30 on a Sunday night, feeling weary the weight of tired's suppression. The type of tired that makes you feel the weight of your very shoulders, heavy. In the distance blue thunderheads tower in front of a purple and pink skyline, and the nearly full moon stands tall, looking down upon all it reigns over. Sighing is the only sentiment that makes sense. Sighing for contentment and every other emotion of lesser stature combined -a sigh can be heavy with meaning. Heavy, heavy, heavy.
Heaviness that stands the product of much levity.
Two weddings in twenty four hours.
The first (Saturday Night) fanciful, with all the fineries that money can buy. The bride was the oldest daughter of long time family friends -a young woman not much older than my sister. The toasts were eloquent and the music was live; we danced the night away. A white church with an organ, a four course dinner in an Amway Grand ballroom, a well used open bar. Family everywhere, celebrating the miracles of optimism, youth, and promise -it seemed we were all family that night, bound together with the invisible ties of sheer potential and grand vision. We were adopted through our mutual joy and sense of accomplishment.
The other wedding was very different indeed. It took place on a Sunday Afternoon near a lake, near a bowl-shaped valley of Pine saplings I happened across that took my breath away. The ceremony was in a backyard, facing a field. The soft spoken groom was a long-time acquaintance and cousin of a best friend whose family I have nearly been adopted into. The couple seemed younger some how -two kids about to set out on an adventure together -to explore uncharted territories hand in hand. The reception was in the basement of a Conservation Club -a sort of rural fraternity that reminded me of the Grange Society that my grandfather in California is the president of. Finger food was served -and we strolled in the park-like back-yard next to a swollen creek, casual to dance and taking our time in the lazy way Sunday afternoon dictates.
Both filled me with wonder at the capacity of the human heart; at the inexplicably natural, freakishly abnormal phenomena of love. To love one another until death do you part.........
"The ancient rabbi's spoke of Man's eternal longing to be reunited with the rib that was taken from him in the creation of woman. And ever since her creation, Woman has sought to return beneath a man's arm, firmly by his side."



And sandwiched between all of this, tales are relayed from mouth to mouth to my ear about the ethnic cleansing that continues in Kenya. Certain aid groups cannot reach the displaced person camps because of unrest. Today over brunch, besides a pool teaming with splashing children, I heard of such unimaginable atrocities committed against a single family that my blood boiled and I willfully wished to commit murder against complete strangers halfway across the globe. Such hatred, such open rearing of Satan's head, such despicable...... but I digress.
I can feel the anger stirring in my veins right now.

And I know that similar acts take place across the globe on a daily basis.

Where does love fit into all of this? Optimism? The setting out on a great journey?
One wedding was afforded with unimaginable wealth. I have never gone hungry. The other took place with the gorgeous background of nature behind the alter. No bombs fell upon our heads, no doors were kicked in. Where do we fit in in our display of arrogance? The world spins on just as it had, despite the weddings of Rachael and Sean. The tides rise and the sun sets just as it had, despite murders in Kenya.
Once again I found my head heavy heavy heavy with too many thoughts to share in on coherent post. More to come, rest assured.

torn asunder, severed in twain

I'm up late for the first time in a few weeks, and Pulp Fiction playing on VH1 doesn't afford the companionship I am craving. The only other alternative I see at this point in time is to consider the higher powers that be; to acknowledge the startling fact that we are never as alone as we think. Metaphysics once again serve as a conversation with an old friend we haven't called in a while -that sometimes calls us when we forgot their number was still on our contacts lists. They call us in the middle of the night and draw our attention away from both the infamous "Ned and Zed" scene bogged with "Deliverance" references, and previews for the newest Mike Meyers piece of garbage alike. Something tells me I shouldn't bother my mind with such trifles anyway.
I was down at festival tonight when lighting started flashing in distance, forking in the south and east, framed in the gap between two buildings. I was in Calder Plaza, amid the tents and pennants that call to mind Medieval carnivals of old. It's usually such a deserted place. On Sunday afternoons the clock towers ring and the tolls echo off the buildings and sculpture, causing a haunting sensation of a deserted city. To see it so uncharacteristically filled with people is a sight I am not accustomed to.
The lighting, or perhaps the rain who's coming it surly foretold, was the starter's pistol shot that hailed the mass exodus of the masses. As I walked back to my car, I thought of the lighting's power.
"The boundary between our world and the next is torn asunder!" I said to a friend, "It has been severed in twain!"
This seemingly exaggerated exclamation (as are in my nature to cry), caused me to dwell on the poignant potential of lighting. Many hours later, my thoughts once again turned towards it. I was smoking on the back patio of my apartment, sheltered from the rain by the deck of the Indian family who live above us. The lighting clawed all around, so large I subconsciously ducked, as if some missile was tossed at my head.
Here was my thought:
What if the boundary between our physical world and the spiritual world beyond us was much closer and much thinner than many of us are inclined to think? Perhaps lighting really is the cracking of said boundary -and for one instant we were granted the briefest of glimpses into the blinding, sheer white light of everything else we cannot imagine? -the tiniest peek through the door of the waiting room that is our life? And the thunder that follows is the deafening slam of said door, or maybe the incomprehensible shock of such an unnatural boundary being broken?
I know, I know. Lighting is just protons and electrons, expanding and the like, and the universal is much better hidden from our ignorant, finite eyes. But what if?
Each bolt is not just a crack, but an open window with no screen? The physical world we occupy is no splitting egg shell, it is a void with volume, and lighting occasionally strikes the ground, sometimes housed, trees and people. Then those houses, trees, and people are caught in the crack -feet in the door between the temporal and universal. Heaven crashing down, too much for our small delicate frames to handle, consumed in energy five times hotter than the sun. Fried in place, gold necklaces welded solid into skin.
Then I thought of those war movies showing men marching at night, with artillery shells bursting in the distance, causing flashes not unlike lighting just over the horizon. Maybe, just maybe, to be caught in the center of that burst is to be ushered directly into the next world too.
The end of the world is something like this snow globe we call a world crashing on the floor of the universe, and all the glass we call a sky shatters, leaving the city that was always there but without the water and plastic snow that flies creating chaos, blinding the citizens and and confusing all. All the lighting will strike at once, and in a blinding light that contains all the colors there are, everything that prevents us from moving forward on our due path will be ripped away leaving clear, obstructionless sight which we will find unrecognizable because we have been snowbound for so long. Then the Spring of the ages will begin -Aslan Style.

wishful, simplistic thinking.
the ponderings of a GRCC student just out of freshmen year.

God the creator of all would not be so easy -so trite- to comprehend.



Julius' quotation of Ezekiel is entirely fictional. Don't waste your time looking it up. Vh1 edits the movie thickly, layer upon layer, drowning in stew, bastardizing in until it's barley recognizable from the original; the xerox of a xerox of a xerox.
The motorcycle Bruce Willis rides away on is named "Grace." Symbolism can sometimes be cheap as well.