Life is long
And the dreams we had
When we were young
Seem so naïve now
Seeing the world through that lense
Where your opinions are a mix
Of what your parent told you
And what you rebelled against
I thought America was a shining jewel
A beacon of the possible
A hope in a world where the darkest parts of us
Often strut about on the stage
And now
I see its deep flaws
Its horrific tragedies
Its blatant lies
What once was golden is streaked
With green
That false gold
Eaten by exposure
We aren’t any more divided than we always were
We just have the tools to see it now
We aren’t limited by what the local paper publishes
By what makes it on the 3 channels of television
People’s egos get bound up in belief
People’s communities get bound up in single idea activism
It is hard to walk away from all you have ever known
Hard to hold a line when doing so loses every tie
Hard to accept that the belief you had
Was wrong
To embrace metamorphosis
What is and what isn’t, is not paradox.
Seeing reality as a cycle is to look upon a sphere and see only the surface. It can be a useful tool but it is a child’s step away from ignorance to truth.
We fall into this trap consistently. Seeing things in stark contrast to the other. Always a binary solution set which confirms our internal bias.
Rather than viewing the totality. Because doing so overwhelms and we equate being overwhelmed with fear.
However, we cannot drown beneath these waves. And seeing reality as it is can only be a benefit. If your mind can withstand it without snapping back to the duality we cling to.
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Happy-virus
This idea that we should strive to be happy at all times is a false narrative. It presents us with a fictional truth, usually in service of selling us something. Be it a lifestyle, a car, detergent, or love.
This idea that every moment should be filled by the elevated state that is happiness is just flat wrong.
The baseline should be contentment with spikes of happy and the very occasional unhappy moment.
A constant elevated state of happy is, I assure you, drug induced. Or a fabrication.
It’s all about the base state.
Baseline content with spikes of unhappy with very occasional spikes of happy would be considered unhappy.
Baseline unhappy with spikes of contentment and very occasional extreme spikes of happy would be considered miserable or depressed.
Baseline happy should be considered manic. Contact your/a therapist.
Baseline extremes both indicate something is seriously wrong. Both need to be addressed with changes.
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The slow social descent into barbarism
The vast majority of activists are part time. They see an issue in their youth or after a major life change and they go full Don Quixote for a few years(at most). Then they stop. They move to other activities. Put their money and time towards other things.
Because change is hard. You can’t tear out an entrenched establishment by the roots with a few tugs. Its a colossal entity. It takes time and slow erosion.
You have to keep showing up. Keep donating. Keep voting. Keep speaking. It’s, frankly, exhausting. So rather than stop completely, I am asking that you pick two of the things. One has to be to keep voting. As long as they are pretending its a fair system, we keep voting. And for the other, pick one.
It took 50 years for the far right to pack the Supreme Court with politically motivated justices who are completely willing to forego precedent and overturn prior decisions. All while screaming about states rights. States rights being code for racist, homophobic, and misogynistic legislation and rulings.
States don’t need more rights. Broadly speaking, they have all the rights they need. Look at all the red states packing their legislatures and overturning voting rights for the last 50 years.
And look at all states who have legalized marijuana. Despite federal law.
Excluding rights from the citizenry is not a states rights issue. It’s a authoritarian issue.
Conservatives screaming about legislation from the bench are now eerily quiet, now that they are getting their way.
Hypocrisy. On the bench. In our legislatures. In our families.
Keep fighting. As much as you can. Don’t just give up. These are dark times. But eventually there is a light.
Whether that light be the dawn of a new day, or the bonfires of revolution.
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Hope is a fragile thing
I sat down to write a poem
Finding its measure wanting
And its rhythm trite
I end up here once again
Pondering this lack of sight
I find my interest waining
Not in writing
So much as life
Never having planned to come this far
I find myself forced
Made to contemplate a future
One I was certain would never come
I have all of the pieces but not the puzzle
All of the dreams but not the hopes
And the world fades out
But nothing yet fades in
On the verge of destruction
Waiting for the groundswell
A last minute effort
To give that last push
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The last stage of mourning
With all the awful, dehumanizing, evil fuckery that is happening in this country(USA) and around the world, I take solace in this simple fact.
The current arc of humanity is extinction.
Now that almost all hope that humanity will somehow conquer its base fear and somehow stop internalizing the structures and mechanisms of its own destruction, I can only rejoice in the ultimate end of the species.
May whatever supplants us do better.
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The brighter the light, the darker the shadow
I have a theory and to understand this theory you’ll need to understand the context. A prominent figure has 2 seperate pending felony cases. One is assault with sexual intent and the other is straight up rape. This same person an ethical and moralistic business person. Putting employees above self enrichment. Famously, they lowered their salary to 70k a year and raised/lowered everyone else’s in their company to the same level.
Across the board a good thing.
But also something this person hits on again and again in social media.
Now, doing good for others is great. But doing it, then using that good to keep yourself constantly in the news or limelight…it becomes clear that you had secondary motives.
So what’s the theory?
The theory is: The more public good you do publicly, the worse your private secrets are.
I see it over and over again. They think they can justify their actions by doing good elsewhere. All while doing evil in private.
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Just one more hour
I’m procrastinating. Procrastinating going to sleep because tomorrow I have to work. If I had the day off, I’d be sound asleep.
Because that’s the trade off. Sleep means less time for myself. Less reading, less me.
Unless I’m relaxed, in which case, it means dreams and other lives.
But I’m not relaxed. Tomorrow I work. I have it better than many. I work from home. My work is remote and its all mind, little physical. I have a good boss, a good team.
But my time, my life is not my own. And that’s hard.
Vacations don’t help. They merely serve as counterpoint to work days. Throwing into stark relief the difference between my own recognizance and work hours.
The truth is I’m burned out. Not by work necessarily, but by life. This endless grind just to exist. I want more than that.
But find myself tied down by responsibility and reality in equal measure.
I feel like screaming, STOP!!!
Hoping the world will just freeze. And for a time, I can just be. So I can heal.
But I don’t think it will ever happen. I’m too burnt out for hope.
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If we choose to look, we might see
I have things to say but I don’t want to share. These things feel beautiful and fragile. They are ephemeral and can’t withstand the scrutiny of others. I cannot describe to you what I have experienced. Not adequately.
I can abstract away and say that the ground shook and the sky was threaded by storm and lightning. And the reality shifted and what was absent came into being. Ancient fail-safes manifest and destroy the oldest repository of knowledge.
The lives I’ve lived. The realities all blended together.
You might say it’s a dream. But I lived it. Experienced an entire lifetime in a single night. It’s etched into me and I remember. The same way I remember my past.
I live other lives. Other lifetimes in dreams. Or not dreams. They say that one side constructs and the other observes. But that’s not actually how brains work. Left and right brain are legacy thinking before we knew what we were talking about. When it was all just postulation and philosophy.
There is a even older term, before we collectively decided that any knowledge before the industrial age was nonsense.
A dreamwalker. One who moves between lives, between realities, outside of the linear perception of time.
I think there are more of us than we think. But remembering is a skill. As is being aware in the dream. And we have forgotten. In a quest to forge a way forward, we discarded what was.
Or worse, deal ourselves a deck of absolutes. And in so doing, fail to embrace all we could be.
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Happy Birthday
Supposedly we are supposed to seek out 3rd spaces. Places that aren’t home and aren’t work where we can just be. The idea being that these serve as social gatherings where we can just be rather than be something. Rather than the system administrator or the boyfriend, the brother, the sister, or the wife. Somewhere we can throw off the obligations of being and just be.
But our choices…our choices in the USA, all come with price tags. The closest we come. Is the neighborhood bar, but what if you don’t drink? All of these places we might suggest all feel like liminal spaces to me.
Somehow not one thing or another but just this endless maybe which exists to draw us out.
And once we are there, we are what? Forced into socializing? Why? Because we don’t have time to just sit back and read a book and drink coffee. We have maybe 4 hours before we turn back into a pumpkin.
But, I don’t want that. I don’t want to change back into anything. I just want to be myself without the obligation of being what others need me to be. I want to be free.
But, here, we are never free. We need that money. We mortgage our lives for the possibility of retirement. To enjoy our life at the tail end. When it no longer matters. When what’s mostly possible is done.
I wish I had done things differently.
But I’m just as trapped as anyone. Because that’s what they don’t teach. That if you want to be free, you gave to carve out your own spaces.
Because, America was never meant for that. It has always been the place where money was the only currency. And we spill our blood on the wheel. One more revolution. One more failure. One last glittering lie.
Pelgris 