What's really going on; dgc...lmnop!

I’m getting paranoid. The other day I heard Sophocles echoing down the hall…he was accusing Coleridge of contributing to the exodus of faith. The Mariner’s not to blame, he’s only a sailor—reliant on wind. Not unlike Traveling through the dark, these mythic giants don’t waste time wondering what the other path would have resulted in, they contribute to the value of shadows and shades, and their only evidence exists is faint shadows. More like ashes, like what Pompeii left behind. I can’t differentiate between my life and fiction. I can’t figure out how to sculpt my own theories yet…not without support…but I’m fine with this.

I’m Big Chief, sweeping my broom around the ward. My family would go to these meetings with our pastor. Tuesday nights in the same hall where the Friday night fish-fry took place. Remember those old church halls in the part of the church that seemed invisible from the outside as you passed by on the street. The felt-covered accordion-style room dividers on tracks that crossed the great hall three or four times creating smaller rooms for classes. It was at one of these meetings my mom read a poem she’d written about masks. I couldn’t understand her obsession with pointing out the obvious. Of course people put on masks…I knew this innately as a 10 year old kid. It was her making such a row out of the notion that threw me off. This seemed the way everything operated.

I wasn’t aware of the consequences, nor was I really aware of the context wherein masks appear and disappear…I only knew to change my presentation under different particular situations. I wasn’t aware on a conscious level that people could be manipulated under these conditions…I simply believed that people behaved differently to suit a given context and the best I could hope for was friendly discourse. Of course discourse for a 10 year old boy, is playing a made up game, playing wiffle ball, or D and D. None the less, if I could behave in such a way that gave me an opportunity to win I did that, assuming everyone else was behaving likewise. My mom’s insistence that this behavior should be stopped was one that I adhered to for a long time. I realize now, my mom was in her early thirties, and she thought her experience was unique and because no one seemed as perturbed by the hypocrisy of such behavior she felt the need to “represent” so-to-speak and she rebelled. By thirty I knew this kind internalized rejection of what happens in socialized settings was how people interacted. People wear masks…it’s necessary. Occasionally people unveil what they think is a mask and this continues in a back and forth, ebb and flow that adds to the beauty of us. We are wonderfully imaginative.

Anyway, she read the poem and we all sat there silently. I liked it. Thought it was honest but it was my reaction to the pastor’s solemn and somber reaction that planted the seed…this is a tragic p.o.v. His entire body language emblazoned on my psyche—this is not the way to view human interactions. Like everyone has an ulterior motive is such a skewed perspective from reality that it’s shameful. Someone could have just asked one simple question…So?

…And your issue with this?

…Yes, this is how we know when it’s safe to take off the masks.

…or to put one back on.

I feel like Big Chief. The ward. If I am Big Chief, I’m liking my chances. Not so much for McMurphy, he’s doomed…he bit off mor’n he c’n chew with Big Nurse. Tom Wait’s says, “don’t believe a lawyer when he swears.” Shakespearian. These are the ashen figures I speak about. Big Chief is a dark shadow in the mind as you read and later think about in your daily life and the shadow darkens and stands like a Neanderthal silhouette hunching behind your peripheral spectrum. This mythic figure following you around…sweeping his broom. Ahh! It’s inescapable! This is nothing but beauty—confusion.

The kids are like a new earth—an earth in its infancy—being pummeled by information and experiences. Every new experience—and they are prolific in production—is a violent explosion of meteoric proportions. A weathering that can only take place in the violence of birth. The earth was violent in the shaping of it, and yet it’s beautifully round. A more apt metaphor cannot exist in terms of literature. The roundness of earth’s character suggests complexity and beauty as all round characters in literature seem to exhibit. This is the same for these kids…time for retrospect comes in brief flashes…clues and cues…too much is happening to stop and assess.

I couldn’t take the train to prague this weekend. The train workers are on strike. They had a successful strike I guess…’cept the way I see it, I don’t get to see my kid till tomorrow. I’m quite certain no…kein gmbh suffered under the weight of this strike as much as me. You see, I’m still somewhat ego centric. The difference is that now I know it’s not intentional. It’s not something happening wherein I am the central character. When you’re in seventh grade….absolutely everything is a reflection in which you are the center. You get to be in eleventh grade and kids have weathered some…not so easily amused. A bank has already started developing. This sort of fellow…we’ve seen this before…but still, nothing in comparison to 45 years. But the beauty is that new experiences are still as prevalent.

The earth is the earth. Beauty has an open-door policy. You can’t see beauty until you’ve weathered. Rather, versions of beauty change, and the most remarkable thing about life is that currently…always right now…is the most opportune time to witness the pinnacle of beauty. After it’s past it only becomes something you can try to explain…if it hasn’t happened yet it only becomes idealized versions of reality…the now…is only available when it’s happening.

When the earth was new it took a beating. The guys on the Ward, they're formed old earth but Big Nurse and the Combine doesn't like the shape of their landscape and like a meteor shower they work and weather 'em. "Work 'em woe," old Mariner said. The students in my classes are perfectly formed planets of their own...yea! but we weather 'em and work 'em, rain down a thousand years of storms and like a storm front works the fields so do we work their lives until one snaps, dries up, got no more to give.