Stop lights! Why are there so many stop lights? Why should these other people have the right to go anyway? Don't they know I want to go home after a long day of screen-staring, procrastination and slow death? Detaching my mind from the cars passing in the "No turn" lane, and the cheaters at the four way stop signs, I zip through the school zone and finally make it home.
Home! The Greeks call it Oikos. My home has good bones. Built in the 1800's, it is tired, neglected and in need of attention. We have an affinity for one another I think. I turn the key in the lock and sigh in relief, breathing deeply as time slows again to the pace of life. If I could just spend my time here, sinking into the steady slow heartbeat of this place, absorbing its healing energy, I could grow.
I set down my keys, wishing it were so easy to set down my demons, wishing those demons didn't follow me home, following the scent of my car exhaust, feeding on my fears, relishing in my weaknesses.
Again I breathe deeply, taking in the smell of old books, older wood, and last night's fish fry. Thus starts the dilemma. Tomes of knowledge arcane and mundane beckon like a lost child separated by great distance from careless parents. Louder and more persistent the Sony Flat Screen TV calls out and then casts its Gorgon-like gaze to deadly effect upon my enfeebled brain.
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius
As I sort through the desk drawer looking for new batteries for the TV remote, I am reminded of "Marcus" as I call him. Once while on a trip to the Mediterranean I discovered his diary and while riding to my next destination, I would circle passages from his Meditations which awakened parts of my soul that I had not known were sleeping. Stoicism always seemed to me to be an ideal to strive for in life, even though the pull of hedonism is so much easier to follow. Cursing at the batteries for not easily snapping into place, I smile thinking on virtue and self-determination...and lying. The truth is a powerful weapon once recognized, but in today's world being a master of lies, now that will get you places.
I fall back into my favorite La Z Boy chair with a mechanical crank sound I pull the side arm lever that raises the footrest to a comfortable level. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!!! Damn hunters!! They are way too close to the house again! Whether it's duck, pheasant or deer season they shouldn't be firing weapons with that kind of firepower so close to where people live.
My house has twenty-six windows which bathe each room in the beautiful sunshine of the day...when we have sunshine. I chose to keep the original lead glass which has a charming distortion effect on the images outside. I've always felt that the view through them transported me through history to a time when adventurers settled this region in hopes of a new beginning. Since I boarded up most of those windows, the voices of those settlers drifts distant like people trying to talk from passing vessels while the tide and surf pull them further away from each other. Peeking through a crack in the boards, I am unable to detect the source of the gunfire, and so settle again in my favorite chair.
I switch the set on. Surfing through the guide, looking for sports, weather, music videos or pro-wrestling, but inevitably settling on the News since it was the only thing on.
As I sit here, staring at the television screen, listening to the hypnotic babbling of the journalist, my mind wanders to the subject of ghosts. I believe in ghosts, which may seem like a conflict since I am also an atheist. Ghosts are really a fascinating topic. They are tangled in almost every mythology and religion we have ever known and unlike Satan or Pixies, belief in the existence of ghosts is more common today than ever. Until recently, there were many shows on television devoted to the search for the existence of ghosts. Whether you believe in ghosts for religious reasons, or because you believe some long lost ancestor still dwells in your home, because of electronic voice phenomenon or even because of Einstein's Relativity Theory and how it describes parallel dimensions, you can no longer deny they are real. I have seen them! Ghosts are all around us.
The talking head on the news show continues to babble. My attention focuses on the speaker as he quotes Thomas Paine, "I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace". I laugh...a cold, cynical laugh of someone who has seen things no child should see. I retort back to the TV screen, "When men give up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon." Like that pundit even knows who Thomas Paine was! Pah! When I was a kid we had to memorize sections of Crisis I and KNOW what was meant by it!!
My shouting must have disturbed my wife who enters the living room with a disapproving look, "Talking to yourself again? I wish you would stop staring at that thing and do what you know you have to do."
I look up lovingly and say, "I know you are right, but it's just so damn hard! I've put it off my entire life, talking the talk, but when push comes to shove I just want to rest. I am so tired you know. Nothing has gone as I had hoped".
Sensing my distress, she asks me, "Are you going to go down to the church and register today, I did!"
Boiling with anger, the words tumble out in an explosion I soon regret, "WHAT THE FUCK FOR???? You know we are both atheists!!! They can kiss my ASS!!!
"Okay, honey" she says, looking down at my leg, she asks me, "How is it?"
I look at her, our souls touch and words are said that cannot be heard by those without the telepathic link of long years together. I get up, grumble, and make my way outside to pick some vegetables. It's been a long day and I am hungry.
Despite my hunger, I decided to wait until night to head out to the garden. I love nature and have felt a strong bond with the Earth since I was little. As a child, I used to swim out to a little wooded island and bask in the silence of nature. Well, not exactly silence, there were cardinals chirping, fish splashing, the rustle of leaves...just no human noise. One of the best days of my life, I was lying in the woods during a heavy snow, just listening to nature when a muskrat walked right up to me, briefly looked my way as if in acceptance that I belonged there, and then continued on his path. There used to be a show on television when I was a kid called Grizzly Adams. He was a fellow with a spiritual bond with nature. I burst into singing,
"Deep inside the forest is a door into another land,
Here is our life and home,
We are staying, here forever in the beauty of this place all alone,
We keep on hoping...
Maybe, there's a world where we won't have to run,
Maybe, there's a time we'll call our own,
Living free in harmony and majesty,
Take me home,
Take me home"
Even when I feel like the world is about to end, singing that song lifts my soul and gives me hope that all is not lost. Yes, take me back home! I digress a bit, but hunger and nostalgia will do that to even the most focused of men.
About my garden...I actually have two gardens. The first garden is a flower garden that I put in along the border of my property to keep the church worshipers from parking in my yard. I had asked them nicely to park at the church but they seemed to feel I had no claim to my land and did what they liked until I put the flower garden in. It seems even the most devout believer refuses to drive over my daisies! At least this was true until a couple of years ago when the local church filed a complaint with the Homeland Administration for Religious Services. A few days later my lovely flower garden was paved over with a sidewalk that leads directly to the house of God.
I amble over to my veggie garden, carefully hiding in shadows, which is fairly easy to do at night. My small village only had a few street lights including the old farm light pole next to my garden, but none of those lights work. There is a faint glow from a fire down the street. The acrid smoke from the blaze hangs on the air like a morning campground the day after a major holiday.
I grow a lot of heritage tomatoes, asparagus, melons, squash, lettuces, chives, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes and quite a few grapes, peaches, cherries, and even a variety of kiwi. I am at home in the garden and will gladly lose myself tending to weeds, removing harmful insects and encouraging praying mantis and lady bugs to work their magic. A quick inspection of my garden confirms my worst fears. It is gone. All gone! Not even a green tomato is left. Damn vandals! Where do they come from? Why can't they go somewhere else? I had always thought that living in a small village where everyone knew each other would afford me a certain level of respect, if not respect... privacy.
As I leave the garden to head back inside, I kick something with my foot in the darkness. Fumbling on the ground I find a handful of rifle casing which don't really interest me, but there is something else. Its metal, the size of my hand and feels like an old Sony Walkman. I slip it into my pocket and retreat to the house.
I'm not going to say I am not saddened by what has happened to my garden; I put a lot of my essence into the family plot, and it will take some grit to return things to their proper order. However, first order of business is survival, so I don my rubber boots and head into the basement. It looks like the sump pump has stopped working, so I navigate gingerly through the water until I can find a foothold to the drier side where I keep a supply of canned goods on a back shelf. Mushrooms, spinach, creamed corn, Chef Boyardee Beef Raviolis and fruit cocktail...lovely! I grab a can of raviolis and a bottle of water and start to head to the kitchen. Suddenly the entire basement shakes and I am tossed back and forth like Captain Kirk in a Star Trek battle sequence. Damn trains! Sheesh! I fish some cans of spinach out of the water and lament over my now wet pants, then carefully take the steps up to the kitchen.
Call me paranoid, but when life started to get hard I didn't go out to the internet and stockpile gold and silver. You can't eat gold and silver no matter how much you have. Instead I made sure I had a hand crank can opener, lot of canned goods, spring water, many packets of soap, health supplies like band aids, peroxide, iodine, salt. With great satisfaction I open my can of raviolis with my handheld can opener, grab a spoon and head into the living room to watch some news.
Plopping into my favorite chair, I flip the TV on and one of those annoying public service announcements is playing, Have you signed your Pledge of Allegiance form yet? What are you waiting for? Americans everywhere are rushing to get their Pledge of Allegiance Form and new Homeland Identification badge before the October 1st deadline. Go to your local Homeland Administration for Religious Services office today and deliver your form in person! As if that commercial wasn't annoying enough, it is followed with one of those "Keep it to Yourself Buddy" slogan ads put out in an attempt to keep people from conspiring against the government.
Pledge of Allegiance! Pah! My allegiance is to the good mankind can do for one another not some bloody government, hell bent on destroying mankind! The commercial reminds me of a quote by Leo Tolstoy, "The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded". Don't misunderstand me, I felt deep and profound love for the government as designed under the original Constitution. Did they get it all right? No, they were victims to their own history, particularly concerning slavery and women, but they built a good foundation and I believed fiercely in the power of the words, WE THE PEOPLE. Depending on how you view it I was either blessed or cursed with an inquisitive mind and have often been called a gadfly, paranoid, lost in fantasy, and much worse by those who know me best. It has always been my lot to question the need for support our troops ribbons, American flag lapels, Christian necklaces, tattoos with your girlfriend's name on them...
The News has come back on, but before I can concentrate on what the talking mannequin has to say I notice that an old friend has stopped in.
"Hey bud" he says, did you watch the hockey game last night? I look up at him like he's lost his mind and a smile creeps slowly across his face.
"When are you going to stop staring at the boob tube and get into the game?", he says. "You too"? I say. My wife was just saying the same thing about me the other day.
With a searing gaze, my friend says, "Well if the shoe fits, hombre...what can I say? I don't get you. You are smart as all hell, you know what the right thing is to do and yet you are hunkered down in this old house hoping for what? Invisibility? You don't think THEY know you are here? Anyway, I just thought I'd stop by and see what you were doing. I've got a meeting in a few minutes with a secret organization. You should get to know them, they are good people."
As my friend leaves, I scoff under my breath, "Secret organizations! Pah! He wouldn't know the difference between the Illuminati and CIA Black Ops! If he doesn't start showing a little more caution he's going to get whisked away to one of those secret Homeland Deportation bases President Bush had not so secretly built in Ohio just before he invaded Canada and Mexico! Freakin moron, be careful!!
So much has happened I never expected to see in my lifetime. Some people usually follow that with, I never thought I'd live to see us go to the moon. Well... damn it! I was shocked it took us so long to get there! Honestly, if our system of government were working properly we'd have had people on Mars and a new space vehicle that doesn't need to have its heat shield replaced after every re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. No, my list is a little different. I would have thought that after Vietnam the people would know better than to trust their government to tell the truth concerning war and resources. I would have thought that more questions would have been asked after 9/11, and that the truth would shake the foundation of our Nation and lead to the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. I never thought that we would start wars in the Middle East with no tangible evidence of any Act of War. Then when President Obama was assassinated under mysterious circumstances, days after he had been re-elected, I thought there would be an investigation. And I never, ever, EVER thought another Bush would become President, let alone be serving his third term! Especially not after he sacked Ottawa and Mexico City! I can come to no other conclusion than to say we are a Nation of barbarians.
I am stirred from my musings as I notice the metal object I picked up outside is rubbing painfully against my sore leg. I fish the object out of my pocket and it is indeed an old cassette player...not a Sony Walkman, but a cheap Radio Shack player made in South Korea. Before President Bush signed an emergency order censoring and then later shutting down the internet, most people like me were getting news updates from fast streaming shadow sites that moved constantly but kept us informed about what was really going on in our government and around the world. Just before the censorship, most Americans didn't even know we had formed a shadowy alliance with the Russians and joint-nuked the Middle East, dividing the oil reserves between ourselves and the hell with Europe or anybody else. In one day the entire Sharia-Islamic-fascist threat we'd been spoon fed for decades was wiped off the map along with millions of innocent people who happened to be sitting on top of the world's most valuable commodity. After the internet was shut down, people who wanted to remain informed switched to Ham radios and cassette players, anything that was portable, didn't require a computer and was hard to track down became a valuable commodity. For a cassette player, even of this quality to fall into my hands a high-ranking journalist for the American Resistance Forces must have been very close to my home. In my opinion, they must have been in danger of getting captured and tossed it near my garden, hoping to pick it up later.
Curious as to what information the device might contain, I click the play button.
Immediately a frantic feminine voice began to speak,
"There's been constant shelling in the city,"
"... It's chaos here."
"Every house on this street has been hit," she continued.
"This is a very poor neighborhood on the city's East side.
The top floor of the building I'm in has been hit, in fact, totally destroyed. There are no military targets here. There is a citizen based Michigan Militia. They are heavily outnumbered and out-gunned, but they have retreated into the woods far north of the city.
"It's a complete and utter lie they're only going after terrorists.
The American Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians." Bombers and Fighter jets are launching endless salvos. Ford Field, Cobo Hall, are an inferno!
Forget about Detroit going bankrupt, it has simply been reduced to rubble. God help us! God help us all"!
The player clicks off. I rewind it and listen to the message several more times until the batteries die.
I'm really not certain how much time has passed since the batteries on that cassette player died, but I am certain most of my remaining hopes gave up the ghost at the same moment. When President Bush released most of the American military and reduced the Pentagon to zero as an austerity measure I initially jumped for joy. Sure I thought he was insane, or more likely hopped up on coke like his brother Dubya, but finally there would be an end to the military-industrial complex that had been tearing our nation apart for half a century! Then Bush signed an executive order as commander in chief giving himself full control of all military decisions, including the formation of the new Homeland Agency of Defense.
The Homeland Agency of Defense was comprised of many ex-Black Water commanders and quickly filled up with mercenaries from around the world whose primary allegiance was to the President... as long as oil currency and a promise of land free of nuclear contamination was offered. The Homeland Agency of Defense attacked the Middle East, Canada and Mexico. The European Union quickly collapsed and for reasons beyond my comprehension China and Europe did not or could not fire its nukes at the US or Russia.
Recent Presidents love war! There was the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on terrorism, the war to end oil dependency, the war against gays, foreigners, atheists and actors...my musings are suddenly interrupted by the voice on the News.
Welcome again to the Homeland Network News. Today has been labeled Black Thursday. Despite recent austerity measures the Dow has plummeted to 1800 on fears that OPEC Nations, including Mexico and Canada will issue sanctions today against the United States for the recent threats issued by President Bush to take military action in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Oil prices have soared to $500 per barrel and it is estimated that a single gallon of gasoline will top $25 this Fall. Groups of fringe lunatics calling themselves the American Resistance Forces have taken to the street swearing they will take back this country, seeming to forget that the President and the ruling Senate were legally elected. This movement has been growing since the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court were disbanded and is rumored to be arming themselves. The President has declared the American Resistance Forces a terrorist organization and has sworn to send all of the enemies of the State to Gitmo...and in sports...
I finally flick the remote onto the floor, turning the television off and notice I am sitting in complete darkness. My wife notices that I had tossed the remote down and looks over to me and says, "Well it's about time!"
"What? What are you talking about"? I ask.
It's about time you set that remote down! ,she says. You just defy logic sometimes! You know what you have to do and you sit in front of that busted television like a drooling idiot! I can't imagine what you are thinking! For crying out loud, the emergency manager cut all power to citizens in Michigan weeks ago until everyone signs the Pledge! You didn't want to buy a generator claiming the gas prices are too high! So yeah, I am being just a little bit bitchy okay!?! Your leg is really starting to stink, didn't you dress it"?
"Yeah I did my best" I say. "…but it must have turned gangrene anyway. You are right honey, I am going to use the time I have left to make a statement". As a fan of Classical myth I've often felt akin to Cassandra, I have tried my best to warn people that disaster is coming, but it seems that I am a very small person indeed and no one really reads what I have to say or if they do, they lack the talent to get others to believe that my opinions have any value...or maybe I am like a ghost, able to see, hear and feel, but unable to make my thoughts known.
Stop lights! Why are there so many stop lights? Why should these other people have the right to go anyway? Don't they know I want to go home after a long day of screen-staring, procrastination and slow death? Detaching my mind from the cars passing in the "No turn" lane, and the cheaters at the four way stop signs, I zip through the school zone and finally make it home.
Home!
Only this time something is very different. This time I simply pass through the door, uncertain as to how it is possible but very much aware of why I can do it. This time the struggle between sleep and death has been decided. This time, the cycle has been broken and time no longer has any meaning.
I was a good man...an honest fellow who studied hard at academics, enjoyed watching sports and tried hard to make the best of a job that was never meant to be my lifelong career. I had a dog, a wife, a few close friends and enjoyed hobbies like volunteering as a docent, blogging, photography and role playing games. In my spare time I gardened and read books. Although I became increasingly concerned about the political changes in my country I never wanted to be a politician, a leader, a rebel or a fighter. Philosophically I'd describe myself as an atheist with a profound love of nature who dabbled in ancient Stoicism, Buddhism and the Socratic Method. So I ask myself, how the hell did I end up like this? I mean, sheesh, I knew I wasn't REALLY going to be roasting on a spit over the flames of Hell, or playing a harp in some overly white version of Disneyland...I guess I just expected that when it was over, it was over.
I look over at my favorite chair. At first my eyes are fixed on the large brownish stain on my Turkish rug. Slowly my eyes move up and look at a figure whose leg was nearly blown off by a white phosphorus tracer round. A belt ties the wound off at the pressure point, just like my scout leader taught me to do, but no amount of duct tape could have saved that leg. It really is a wonder I made it back home at all. I stare in sick fascination at the dried up corpse sitting in my La Z Boy chair and wonder if I could have done anything different.
My wife looks over at me and in an uncertain tone asks, "Are you coming with me this time"?
I nod my head at her and say, "I finally understand". I half chuckle at her, you see my wife was always better at figuring out the plot before I did.
I gave most of my dad's good guns to my brother years ago as heirlooms. I felt my brother deserved something after all the years of abuse we suffered while living in my father's house. I've always been a pacifist, so all I had left was a WWII German pistol that my grandfather used to use as protection when he drove a taxi, and a rifle with my grandfather's name engraved on it that was older than he was. I pack a few jars of my grandfather's moonshine into a backpack to use as Molotov Cocktails and strap my dad's hunting knife on my belt. My wife is actually far more trained in the martial arts than me and straps a set of katanas on her back, loads an old crossbow and a Glock 9 that I didn't even know she had.
For the first time since we lost mortal form we step outside together. The one thought on my mind, the thought that broke my Sisyphian trial of endless repetitive suffering for the sins of the past...REVENGE!!!