Unknown Caller and the Unknown Future

Laying here, under this bridge, maybe it used to be a road, I've lost the capacity to understand these things, wondering, thinking, didn't I used to be able to follow a train to its conclusion, the railways didn't change, maybe I did,

Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak-- shush, now

Oh, it doesn't make sense, how did I get here, though? Not here, I remember finding this place in case it rains maybe I won't get as wet as if the streets weren't up there, above me with the cars going over them to places, other places, they go too fast, too loud, or they used to be but at night it's easier to hear and there aren't as many, but so things are quieter and the sky is brighter. No, wait. that's not right.

You know your name, so punch it in

Sold my soul for self-control, pushing for the devil's goal, not much more to reach for anymore. That was a stupid thought though, now there is less to reach for, just that broken bottle over there, but it won't look so good if I take it out of the light from the over over the bridge into the shades here even though I look better out of the light they said back then. No, not back then. Now. Near now. Yesterday or one of those days.

Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak

There was a reason why not to do this, except now it's just that I have no money and so it's been too long and I can feel things getting worse and is this what they warned me about? The plane ticket was supposed to not be me except it wasn't the plane ticket they warned me about it was the needle, I wasn't supposed to use the needle ever ever ever ever because things would be bad and I would be bad and friends would all go away or stop being friends or friendly or shewing himself themself itselves friendly

Password, you-- enter here; you know your name, so punch it in
Password-- you. Enter here
Password, you, enter here
password
you
enter here

Whatever is not an expression of apathy, it's the eye of the storm.

To Whom It May Concern, and with all due respect,

My attitude is not defined by the speech-pattern of apathetic dismissal, "Whatever."

My attitude is defined by the final word with which I choose to leave your company, and most people's-- that is to say, "Peace." Which is, in case you didn't know, a shortened form of the full farewell, which is to say, "Peace be with you."

Peace be with you. Peace unto you, and your loved ones, and peace be unto this world, this torn and scarred world, this home of our fragile human race, which is within our power to make a heaven or a hell.

My attitude is in the songs I sing along roads and under echoing bridges and to the open night sky, songs like Sunday Bloody Sunday, songs that fan the flames of my soul, lyrics that grip my heart in a vise. My attitude is in the lines "Where you live should not decide / Whether you live or whether you die" because that is where my passion lies.

I say things like "Whatever," I shrug, I grin and laugh it off often, because my mind is occupied with stories, with dreams, with love and hope and fire and pain and longing, and whether it's the date or the initials that come first on an invoice doesn't even scratch the surface of any of those things. I won't say I couldn't care less, because on some level I do care-- I shrug it off because the mistake's been made, and file away the information for next time. Whether I remember it or not depends on other factors.

Someday, I won't have to walk into a store, pick up an object, and wonder if it was made by hired workers or forced slavery. Someday, enough people will care, enough people will care and think and speak and work, and slavery will be eradicated. Someday, children will stop dying from diseases cured centuries in the past, and people will care as much for the starving continents away as the starving in the slums of the next city over. Someday, this world will cease to be a hell for most of the people in it.

I repeat this to myself at least once a day. I have to. I force myself to believe it as I speak it, to see it in my mind, a world without a hell that could so easily be prevented, because if I start to believe that it won't happen, it hurts, so bad I want to cry.

When I put the earbuds back in my pocket, and I shake the snow or the dust or the rainwater off of my shoes and jacket and walk in, I shake off the passion and fury and sorrow that wars within me, because if I didn't have walls to put it up behind, it would consume me. I'd be impossible to put up with-- more than I already am, that is. But it doesn't go away. Know that. It doesn't go away ever, and I never stop caring, and I am never, ever apathetic. I'm just distant.

Peace, dude.

And I don't want to promise, because I don't want to lie.

So I’m sitting here listening to If God Will Send His Angels, by U2 in Dunkin Donuts, after taking the written portion of my driver’s test. I can’t work on the novel I’m supposed to have done by December. I can’t think. I’m running over things in my mind, restless, upset, not understanding things. That’s how I roll. I worry, and I fret, and I think, and I pick things apart in my mind and analyze the pieces, and then I sit down and write about them. That’s why I want to be a journalist. That’s what makes sense to me. But that’s not what I wanted to say. That was this morning.

I deleted that little bit, this morning, because I wound up wandering off on life careening out of my control, of not understanding my own destiny.

My dad and I had this huge political argument. This time, it started with me telling him what my older sister, who had been in the Army, said about Fort Hood – that it reflected the state of the United States Military. My dad said it had to do with political correctness. I disagreed. We proceeded to argue from there about everything currently on the political plate; I scored a few points, he scored most of them, because he is good at verbal arguments, and I am not. I can write. I’m not good at talking. Anyway. The whole thing culminated with me saying something about universal health care, and him laying a pretty hefty guilt trip on me and then giving me a lecture about using analytical thought instead of following your heart, your emotions.

I cannot accept that. I cannot. I cannot sit here, at my desk at my laptop in this house in America, the United States of, and make imperious analytical judgments without conscience.

I have derided my conscience as neurotic. Maybe it is. But it’s still there. There is still a voice telling me that what I am doing with my life, most of the time, is wrong. I am doing almost nothing to improve the lot of the poor, the sick, the needy in this world. What am I doing to feed the fatherless, the widows? I cannot vote without my conscience. I cannot vote without my emotions. The two are tied, the two are more me than I am, and there’s a logic bomb for you. That is who I am supposed to be. Not who I am, no – I’m not happy with that person. I get angry when people talk about me being a kind or a conscientious person. If I was the person – half the person – who I should be, I would be vegan. I would be working my ass off, and then sending most of my paychecks off to Save Darfur or to pay for cures for malaria, or to combat the AIDS crisis. I don’t hold up to the standards. That’s fucked up. I am not a kind or conscientious person.

My dad gets angry when I talk about this stuff. I don’t phrase it like that – that would be trawling for pity. (I phrase it like that here because I don’t have anywhere else to talk about it. I have to get this off my chest somewhere, and this is the only blog nobody connects with me.) But when I talk about ONE, (Red), Save Darfur, Fair Trade, hell, if I mention the word ‘hybrid,’ I get a death stare. Those, you see, are causes Liberals use to make themselves feel good about themselves. (Sometimes I wonder if he knows that is almost exactly the same thing anarchists say about them.) Those Damn Liberals, they’re so smug about what they’re doing to help the world. That Bono, he’s so smug about trying to fix the world. Don’t they realize that they’re being led around by the nose because they listen to their emotions instead of their minds?

Fuck. That.

After he left, I sat here thinking, wondering, trying to make sense of it all. I have a conscience, you see. It’s neurotic, probably from not being listened to, but it’s there. And, thanks to Slacktivist, I’m starting to see more about the world, viewed through a Christian’s eyes. An evangelical, no less! And someone who’s disgusted by the evangelical scene today, someone who hasn’t forgotten that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord thy God, and the second commandment is to love thy neighbor as thyself. And someone who is consistently calling evangelicals out on it. But I bring any of these points up to my dad, and I get called out as a Liberal, smug in my own false sense of conscience.

I listened to If God Will Send His Angels, and I cried, and I shook my fist at the sky and begged for a sign, and I knelt and pleaded for a sign, and I despaired of there being any hope in this world, any true way to live for a Christian, anything to cling to. And I walked out and sat in the woods, and cried and stared at the sky and was accused by my conscience of praying to Bono, and defended my Not-A-Prayer by saying “at least he’s here, in this world, tangible and real,” and then had to admit that God is more real than anything tangible BUT ANYWAY. I don’t need a sign. I want a sign. I saw a cross, white and lit up, that I’d never seen before, on a hill, just visible behind some houses in the trees. Struck me as odd – I thought I knew that neighborhood backwards – but I desperately went to where it looked to be, and it turned out to be a flagpole.

Really, I should’ve seen that coming. I don’t need a sign. That, I guess, would make things too easy. But God, oh God do I want one. Something – anything – to make it just a little bit easier to believe that there IS a right way, always a right thing to do. I walked home. I sat down. I watched Jon Stewart, I listened to If God Will Send His Angels again, I cried a little more, and then I glanced at Twitter, saw Bono had just tweeted a few seconds ago (if it’s him; not a verified account, but I can be pretty naïve in my desperate hopes sometimes, and I’m willing to believe), and told him in a message he’ll probably never see that he’s a hero. My hero, anyway. Someone who actually gives a damn about this world, someone who’s working to do something about it, and someone who wrote a song pleading for a sign. A modern-day psalm. God, I want that sign. And it’s never given, you know?

There are all these stories, they tell them in Baptist churches, about the diver who’s been an atheist all his life, and one night he’s late at the pool, and he spreads his arms, about to dive into this pool, and perceives that the shape is like a cross, and he gets this spiritual moment of just… I don’t know what, and he walks down into the pool and discovers that there’s no water in it and he would’ve died, and he repents his sins and gives his life to God. It’s one of those posters you see in foyers, like the footprints poster… oh, the footprints poster. A friend of mine wrote on that:

“I guess what irks me about this, and other sentiments, which try to make life's hurts "better" is the implicit message hidden in them. They say, no matter what, there's comfort in knowing God is with you. No matter what, face life with the eternal hope and optimism of Christian life. God will protect you. God will make things better. Your life before Jesus: :-(. Your life after Jesus: :-).
…
So not only did I have issues, I suddenly had a religion that was smacking me across the face with, if you believe in God, it won't be as bad.

So it was bad, so what did that mean? It obviously meant I didn't believe in God enough.

A Good ChristianTM lives in the Grace of God. The reflect the Peace of Christ in everything they do. They walk with the joy of the Lord. They're happy and live happy lives. This was the positive side of religion presented me as a convert. I felt like, simply by being depressed, I was failing at being Christian. My unhappiness and troubles and self-hatred were because I just wasn't good enough.
…
Most importantly what happened was, by slow degrees, by example and prodding and (most important) just figuring it out for myself, I left the world of platitudes and inspirational posters and beaches at sunset and turned to the Cross.

Which, in most churches I frequent, features an emaciated man dying in agony. At some point in the process he, God and most beloved of God, looks up and says, "O God, O God! Why have you forsaken me?"

A man in abject helplessness, incapable of optimism (because optimism is thinking things will turn out okay) but still, in the depths of his despair, with the hope that this suffering will accomplish something. A man who carried his cross though in agony, but who--still--didn't soldier on, ignoring the pain; he fell, grew weak, needed help.

This, I recognized. This was me.

I think, sometimes, we are a little too afraid of pain. We are a little too anxious for everything to be over. We are a little too addicted to neat, clean, pat answers. I'm not advocating drawing things out unnecessarily, but honestly. Can we stop saying, "It's okay," when it isn't?”

So I guess that’s my point, after much rambling and whining and whatnot. It’s not okay. I’m not going to get a magical vision that shows me a clear path, gives me the willpower to follow it, and makes it impossible for me to fall from that path, whether into self-flagellation or apathy or wallowing or whatever the case may be. All I can do is follow what I perceive to be the right path, do what I think His plan for me is to do, and pray that if and when I delve into self-flagellation, apathy, or wallowing, He sends either a friend or a musician or a hero to slap me upside the head and put me back on track.

And that I always remember to write when things stop making sense, and maybe the words will bring me back to where I need to be.
…Amen.

When Love Comes To Town

I was a sailor, I was lost at sea
I was under the waves
Before love rescued me
I was a fighter, I could turn on a thread
Now I stand accused of the things I've said

Love comes to town I'm gonna jump on that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

I used to make love under a red sunset
I was making promises I would soon forget
She was pale as the lace of her wedding gown
But I left her standing before love came to town

I ran into a juke joint when I heard a guitar scream
The notes were turning blue, I was dazing in a dream
As the music played I saw my life turn around
That was the day before love came to town

When love comes to town I'm gonna jump on that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

When love comes to town I'm gonna jump on that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice when they pierced his side
But I've seen love conquer the great divide

When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

--U2 and BB King

October

October
and the trees are stripped bare
of all they wear
What do I care?

October
and kingdoms rise,
and kingdoms fall,
but You go on
and on.
You go on

Dancing, or something a bit like it.

One of my favorite things about life is the crazily silly dances I manage to get away with most of the time, alone. Anyone who knows me would be able to tell you that I Do Not Dance, mostly because I Cannot Dance. But the crazy bobbing-head and waving-arms gestures that pop up around my keyboard must surely count for something! Every so often I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen and have to suppress the embarrassed part of my brain, because a wince would interfere with the beat. And there is a beat, and I do carry it, in my own rather wild way. The other fun thing is the crazy leaping, twisting, capering-and-cavorting sort of dance that I only do when it is a truly joyful song on my mp3 player and I am on the part of the path by the pond that is completely hidden from the rest of the park. Or the crazy dance that came with Pride, by U2, which was performed in a series of leaps and twirls, and presented the major problem with this entire category of behavior.

As with so many of the things I do, there is no good explanation. There is no respectable way to explain a minor injury incurred while dancing wildly away from observers. Fortunately, the worst that ever happened was when I landed partly on a piece of furniture, on my ankle, in the living room in mid-leap and was limping for a day or two. With any luck at all, I’ll never have to explain a sprain in my shoulder or something this way. I might just have to make something up.

I don't have so much a vendetta against dragons, these days.

Sometimes it annoys me how much he’s right, that he sees so much. The thing is, I know what’s there, I just get really good at blocking it out of my mind, and he doesn’t bother with that. But I guess that’s what friends are for—they cut through the bullshit, and see past the fronts you’ve put up, against yourself or the outside world. The half-hearted excuses you use to keep yourself from trying for happiness don’t hold up in any amount of light, and a real friend is someone who won’t let you hide that kind of shit in the shadows. That’s something I’ve always thought of, when I see those stupid “A good friend… but a BEST friend…” stickers/pins/t-shirts/bumper stickers at those stupid stores.

A good friend will laugh with you. A best friend teaches you to laugh at yourself. A good friend will find you the right parties, a best friend will skip the parties with you. A good friend is someone you can talk to, but a best friend is someone you can be quiet with. All that good shit. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's not the physical things, even the physical actions, that define a friendship. It's not even, really, how much you can trust them (it is, though), it's something else, I don't know. A best friend is someone you can drop the mask to, or someone who forces you to drop the mask to yourself.

Honestly, I don't like the label 'best friend,' and am using it here out of convenience. In my mind, it conveys the image of cheap jewelry in the shape of a puzzle piece, of giggles and doing each other's hair, and I know that's a stupid prejudice. When I say 'best friend,' I mean just friend, someone who matters to you... more than most people? I don't know. Friends. You know what I mean. I think.

My closest friends don’t so much influence me as they free me from the influences of the rest of the world. I feel more myself around them, and that has good and bad consequences, pleasant and unpleasant both. I see faults, things I hate about myself, more when I’m talking to a best friend than when I’m alone, than when I’m with anyone else. I unveil more of myself, which means I’m more easily hurt. But the few close friends I have, I wouldn’t trade for anything.

It’s late, and I should probably go to sleep or something, especially since I kind of want to be rid of this lingering fever. But it’s not often I decide to listen to a U2 album, full through, and I’m on the third now, in descending order by year. (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb) Something about an album isn’t complete unless it’s listened to full through, in order. I don’t know why. Certainly songs can be appreciated on their own, and in a different, more individual light, without the context of their album covers. Holistically, though, it’s like… Like looking at the pages of a sketchbook. They can be appreciated on their own, but if you look at them altogether, there’s a bigger image.

Anyway.

But hopefully I'm not really a witch

You know, if I ever found myself being accused of a witch, I think I would wait for a moment when I was alone, probably on Death Row, and sing either Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah—and the whole thing, too, every single verse he wrote—or, or possibly and, U2’s Yahweh. They would both fit, though Hallelujah has a certain hopelessness to it… well, not a hopelessness. A futility. Like Johnny Cash singing Hurt, kind of, he’s run his course, “did my best – it wasn’t much,” and now it’s done, and what can you do but sing? Yahweh is more along the lines of “I walked this road, I know it was the wrong one, please show me where to go from here, I’m lost and all I can see is You now, and I’m scared but still full of love.” …or something.

Anyway. With any luck I’ll never be accused of witchcraft, which is just as well because my voice rather sucks. With any luck, I’ll figure out just what it is I want to do, pretty soon. I don’t have the drive or the inspiration that I used to. It’s strange, it seems almost like my heart has closed itself. I can’t touch that part of me, the deep well of something resembling sadness, something touching pain, and something a bit like ecstasy. It was where I reached for words, for the flow behind the words, and sometimes it gave me tears. Now I laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and the worse life gets the harder that laughter comes, the more it hurts, the more I need it. Like someone replaced a drug I needed with some other drug that I’m now addicted to.

The thing is, now I’ve got no direction. I don’t need a career, I don’t need money, I don’t need a nice home and a car. I did fairly well without them for a fair portion of my life, ne? But I do need a direction. I want to just take to the road, live every Anarchist’s dream and one of mine—spend the rest of my life in a cabin in the woods with no one bothering me ever (maybe decades later someone will find it and be really, really confused), or bike around the continent until I find a place to rest. But I also want to help people, in a major way; I also want to write, and to express in words what this life has taught me, because I need to; I also want to sing, but that’s something I can do anyway from a bike. It’s not easy, or at least not as easy as singing normally, but I can and have done it, for miles at a time. Gives your lungs quite the stretch.

And then there’s the song “Lemon,” also by U2. This song makes more sense if you know the back-story, but it’s beautiful even if you don’t. The first time I heard it, it touched my heartstrings in that way that only Bono really can—I mean the rest of the band too, but it’s his lyrics, the rawness beneath the words, kind of, and his voice singing them—and I nearly cried. Maybe I did. I don’t remember now. I remember the video, Mr. MacPhisto, the devil in a rock-star with a microphone, clinging to that last strand of humanity, he doesn’t know why anymore, drifting from the shore… I don’t know how to put it into words. Maybe only Bono can. Maybe death is an easier loss than insanity.

Remind me never to have a family.

First of all, I'm not crazy.

Finding balance—I had a page on this, it was pretty good stuff, but my computer decided to automatically restart and I lost the whole damn thing. Now I’ve lost a CD—the Unforgettable Fire. It’s not my favorite album, but it’s U2, and I do love it. I have a definite idea of where it is though, in my boom-box inherited from my sister, who left for the army and left me a room small enough to be a walk-in closet, full of memories and bonsai dust and the creepy smiling stares of the Kewpie dolls our grandmother kept on a shelf opposite the bed—which was a small ship’s bunk, which my dad had slept in a generation ago—that room, and a spirit of rebellion, and a mothering job that I didn’t want and no one wanted me to have. When she lived in the room, I used to hang out there sometimes, on the floor by the chair, which you couldn’t sit on because it was covered with stuff: old boxes and toys and little keepsakes from friends, and papers, which she probably needed but forgot about, and we would talk and laugh and sometimes she would get annoyed and throw a shoe or whatever happened to be closest at me. Our grandmother always told her, was telling her to clean her room, and she never wanted to, and it was so messy; eventually she paid me five dollars to clean it for her, but my grandmother wouldn’t let me, and stood over me the entire time to make sure I did it the right way. We had a big fight, and I decided it wasn’t worth the five bucks and went outside to play. That was what I used to do, whenever I could. I’d go out the kitchen, open the porch door, leap down the stairs from the stone patio, and take the yard at a run, eating up the ground and enjoying the wind in my ears, until I hit the semi-circle of pines in the back, and, winded, slowed down to a walk. There was a space behind the pines—still is, that much hasn’t changed—about five to twelve feet wide, depending, a kind of path, unmarked, carpeted with moss and tiny grasses, more like a severely elongated, curving clearing, really, and behind that, a line of trees and brush. There were a few paths into there; the line was only five feet deep or so, but the thorns made it unpleasant enough that you really didn’t want to go around the paths. Once, my sister cut a piece out of a little maple tree growing out there—we all put our tongues to the open part, and it actually tasted pretty good. Most maples out in the woods aren’t Sugar Maples, which are the ones that yield syrup—and they taste pretty nasty, really.

There are two country CDs in my case (I found The Unforgettable Fire a little while ago and finished copying it), both more handed down from my sister. One’s Unleashed, by the infamous Toby Keith; my friend didn’t actually believe me when I told him. The other’s Come On Over by Shania Twain—again, not something you’d expect to find here. It’s not that I have anything against country; Johnny Cash is one of my favorite artists, in fact. It’s just… well, Toby Keith is… well. I don’t like him, suffice it to say. Shania Twain… eh, she just annoys me. There’s also a Dixie Chicks CD (I think), but that’s from a CD case a bunch of my friends and I found in sixth grade. I remember one friend, who had a reputation as a Good Charlotte fangirl and a punk, slipping the Britney Spears album into her binder and telling me not to tell anyone—she couldn’t risk her reputation. I still laugh at that. There’s two Good Charlotte CDs here, one from my dad, years and years ago, when he had no idea what to buy me for my birthday, except that he’d heard me mention them a few times, and the other one a copy from a CD I got for my brother, The Young and the Hopeless, which he liked for a long time and then lost. I like Good Charlotte despite myself, despite my usual tastes. Something about them really appeals to me, my tween side, the side of me that doesn’t actively hate them. I don’t know, really; my New Year’s Resolution is to not be ashamed of music anymore, because it’s cool or because it’s not cool (yes, both of those factor into shame; one, with my anarchist friends, and one, with… well, everyone else.)

It’s funny, life; living; people. Like I said, I had a long page on balance which was better than this, but it got tossed when my laptop updated. (Excuse? What’s a valid excuse?) It had a metaphor involving a bull and a goat! All this came from a bottle of Vault that I looked into as poison (which it is) and swallowed anyway. Balance, counter-balance. If my life was balanced properly, I would be out in the woods right now, doing what I should be doing. Instead… well, here I am. It’s not so bad, really; I should take a walk, there’s a friend I wanted to see today, but there’s no guarantee I’ll get to talk to him, and really I’d be better off waiting here for the clock to turn around enough. We’re going out ice-skating later, a few friends and I. I’m looking forward to it; I really don’t see them enough. I spent this past month working seven days a week, plus school, and that was… well, a mistake, to put it lightly. Balance, counter-balance, emotional equilibrium… HO. HO. HO. My spirit is twisted in knots, my emotions are all fouled up, my soul is kind of clouded… it was not a good month. Unavoidable, and I’m glad for the distractions, but I’m glad it’s over. Another week, I would’ve had to leave this whole place for a month, clear out my soul. I might be doing that anyway, soon—go out, find myself, discover some identity. I’ve needed it for a while now, once we get back to an honest winter, I think I will.