Alonedness

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

--

I can't help but look at you and see a walking, talking corpse. You'll be dead soon won't you? Just fifty or sixty more years of your precious comfort and distraction and you'll be rotting in the fucking grave -- another immature soul ready to spin the wheel again, Pat! Ready to waste another century careening haphazard and directionless 'round the sun.

Just keep putting roofs over heads and food on tables. Hey, maybe you'll manage to survive long enough to get Alzheimer's and forget it all just before you die, confused and alone.

The world is truly against me. No joke. No exaggeration. And it's the biggest chip on my shoulder. It's probably at the heart of my current despair. You just set such a horrible fucking example don't you? You aren't kind, or patient, or long-suffering, or respectful, or happy. Or happy. Or HAPPY. You're sad, angry, hateful, unsympathetic, abrasive mal-intents, who'll manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal at the drop of a hat to get something you want, then go to church on Sunday to thank God for making you in His perfect image. And you see nothing wrong with any of it. You don't worry. You don't regret. You sell out, fuck over, and sleep well at night.

I guess that makes me lonely. Deep, cavernous loneliness, that's me. Last-man-on-Earth style loneliness. Yes, I'm the only one of my kind. The only one who sees something wrong in whiling away this life clocking in and out in pursuit of ever greater paychecks. The only one who sees comfort and convenience as a death knell; as something to stifle and rob him of potential. Who sees ownership as burden. Who sees security as sham.

Oh, but wait, no. Let me explain: I know you all think you see these things. I know you "understand" them and "agree." What I mean is that I actually believe and apply them to my life, not just wax conjectural in agreement when someone brings it up.

I called myself a Christian for a while. Why? Because I loved and followed the teachings of the man they call Jesus Christ. Not because I liked the idea of a magic man dying so that I can go to heaven after I finish up my heathen, money-chasing, comfort seeking, bullshit excuse for an existence. I actually followed the teachings: Give up your property. Be meek. Serve your fellow man... I didn't just show up in suit and tie on shabbat, nodding as the pastor conceptualized. I lived what Jesus said.

And that's where we differ, you and me. That's where I'm alone. I know you don't think I'm alone. You think I just feel alone, right? even though there are so many people who are with me? You for example! You're right here with me. You feel the same way! And since you agree with me when I talk about the shallowness and greed of our culture, I must not really be alone. See, but here's the separating point: I leave our little hypothetical discussion and go back to my minimalist lifestyle where I choose not to work more than twenty hours a week, where I save more than I spend every month, where I hope and plan for a future rich in spirit as well as physical adventure... Whereas you head back to your forty hour work week, and your hundred dollar a month cable package, and your fifty dollar a month cell-phone contract, and your leased, $26,000 automobile, and your adjustable rate mortgage, to plan the next thirty years you'll spend paying it all off, so that you can at last be free to get right back into hawk on some new shit.

That's where I'm alone: Where I actually try - successful or not - to live what I believe in. And if it weren't for you, if it weren't for your overarching societal imperative of 'go to school, get degree, enter profession, acquire spouse, have children, buy home, retire, die...' If there were a few people wandering around who actually lived according to an ethos that didn't revolve around money and comfort and this prepackaged, nutrient-added life-path you all follow like fucking lemmings right off the side of the cliff, then maybe I could find some inspiration and support for a true ideal.

But that isn't how it is, is it? I'm fucking alone. You've all either bought in, sold out, or both, and I'm left as the only human being alive who wants to squeeze some life out of this life before it's up; who wants to be a good, kind, understanding, sympathetic, intelligent, thoughtful, peaceful, spiritually centered adult human being at some point premortem. Oh wait, I'm sorry -- who wants it AND ALSO FUCKING PURSUES IT. Who doesn't expect it to drop out of the sky after fifty years lived in complete contrast to the desire. See, that's what I mean when I say you're out to get me. I look to you for support and comradeship, because you claim the same desires but all you ever really do when I draw near is infect me with passivity, mediocrity, and your inexplicable tolerance of shitty, meaningless lives.

If I had just one person, just one human being who was ready and willing to come with me; one person to lean against, to be stronger for, to share the goal with... If I weren't completely alone, and worse, beset upon by an insipid, insistent world that feigns agreement while chastising and persecuting any who venture it; if I could occasionally say or do something foul and not immediately have it redoubled and returned with a childish "Oh yeah?"; if I weren't the only one making the effort to restrain his baser mannerisms and encourage his higher self... If any of this!

But so long as I never see a real life example of charity, compassion, and love, I'm fucked. If it's just me, making it all up as I go, fighting you all tooth and nail for some small corner in which to practice sanity, it just can't happen.

My father talks about the "end times" as predicted by the author Ellen White -- those last few decades leading up to God's triumphant return and subsequent destruction of everything he first created. While I'm no believer I do seem to keep coming back to the idea of the 'last days;' those that hallmark the end of all human endeavors in which even God, in omniscience, can find some subtle hope or worth.

Ellen White tells us that in the world's final chapter God's true followers will be persecuted and that they shall be forced to flee into the mountains. The common interpretation of this prediction envisions either an atheistic or secular-specific society turning upon the elect, viewing them as some sort of terrorist threat to civilization, and therefore imprisoning them, torturing them, and so forth. Basically what we do to Arabs in this country now. The last of God's chosen who escape the gulags will flee the populated world and hide from their oppressors, safely ensconced in mountainous, uncultivated areas.

I can't help but wager a reinterpretation: In the end times the last few people who consider life as more than simply an effort to gather and reproduce, being mainly separated from one another and therefore very much alone in their pursuit of the higher self, will be forced to flee the retail, consumer driven, TV watching, pop-trivium obsessed, inane, insane world that subdues and persecutes the higher man while bolstering the carnality inherent in his lesser self. They shall wander into the mountains to live unseen and unheard, where they will not truly or fully enjoy all that life might have offered them had they been born at any other than the end of times, but where, abode in their hermitages, they will at least find the peace and devotion their lost and crazed societies would not allow.

As a Consumer, She is Complete

Anyone else having trouble coming up with gifts for people this year? It started last month with my Grandma's birthday. I looked all around her house, considered her hobbies and daily activities, her needs and desires... and found that she has everything in the world. Every thing she could possibly desire is in her possession already. Which is an odd situation, I should think. Not too many can say the same. But I believe it's more or less true in this instance.

She's got a computer that does all she could want of it, with a really nice flat screen my cousin gave her one Christmas, and a printer that gets the job done. Her TVs are just as she wants them. Her kitchen clock-radio is the only she has use for. She's often in the yard, when the weather permits, doing light gardening and heavy cleanup, but she has every utility and device that could assist her in these pursuits already. Her truck is pristine and she's loath to drive more than two miles at a time anyway. She plays bingo every Thursday - or so she tells us - but what am I going to get her a bingo marker? Clothes, furniture, kitchen appliances, toiletries, dishware, phones, electronics... She either has it or hasn't a need for it. As a consumer, she is complete. (There's an album title for you.)

So what do you do?

Meanwhile there's my mom who, as a new-ish home owner, has need and want of a number of things that spring to mind, but they're all just a few dollars outside my anticipated spending zone. I'm considering teaming up, to make the purchase of one of them, but the only other person buying for my mom this year is Grandma, and with two other daughters, each one baring her up another twenty-seven grandchildren, I doubt Grandma's fractional contribution would bring me any closer to my spending comfort zone. Maybe I'll just bite the bullet and spend the big bucks. It would do my miserly comportment some good.

Then there's sister Emily. What do you give to the child who would be queen? I feel that my gift should somehow express my disapproval of her generation's 'New Moon,' Justin Beiber, Miley Cyrus mentality. But what gift could possibly contain all that? Maybe a Dead Kennedys - Mr. Bungle box set. (He said with almost no knowledge of either band's music. And then abruptly ended.)

Black Friday is Murder

Here's to those who die this day, who soon shall breathe their last beneath the footfalls of the slathering, beast-like, obese consumers of this nation; who die, trampled to death, year in, year out, each Black Friday, a witness to America's naked greed; a justification to her enemies.

In mere hours human lives shall end, cut short in the pursuit of what need? What cause? Savings. Yes, in moments men will die for discounts. They will be killed for coupons. Awash beneath the blue of morning's first light, mindless mobs shall murder. Them less sure of foot shall fall and end.

So here's to those who stumble when the mall doors open, and here's a curse upon the heads of all the rest, who pushed and shoved and knew not, and cared not. May they die worse deaths, slower, still more meaningless, than those they kill this day.

May your savings rot and fall off.