Roads

I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.

I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity of a story. As it turns out, I’m protective of my phrases, perhaps too much so, and so I’m learning when to stand my ground and when to let the ground go tumbling out from underneath me and I’m wondering if catapulting my words into the eyes of impartial third-parties will ever feel even slightly comfortable. Right now it mostly feels like every inch of me splayed open in front of scrutinizing strangers, my voice quiet while my words chatter nervously, naked and vulnerable and waiting to be torn asunder should they ramble or run-on or pause for too long.

Twice a week we saunter to sleep before 11pm, invite our dreams to come early so we can rise and add the sound of our feet flying over ice and snow to dark moonlit hours otherwise devoid of all sound, save for the quiet and yet unmistakable hopeful humming of a day just breaking, all consciousness and worry still soundly sleeping, nothing more alive than the blank slate creeping across butterscotch hills laden with promise as long as the trails we traipse, eyes blown open by exhilarating cold, wind dancing across our eyelids. In these pre-dawn hours there is not light enough for worry; to-do lists aren’t welcome here, can’t compete with the peace of legs turning over and over and over still, arms pumping, hot breath steaming in front of faces softly waking, happily star-gazing. I love these mornings best because at 4am there is only the present tense and it’s stunning and I like to think about him climbing and careening down silhouetted ridge-lines above me, his legs warm and loose now and miles ahead of mine, his momentum pulling me ever forward like a conveyer belt of dirt and rock and sagebrush, like the magnetic mountains pull him to them, up and up and higher still.

Yesterday morning I met a hawk on my way into my favorite coffee shop and he let me stand next to him for multiple minutes and I smiled as I admired his stately stance and his dappled rust-red breast and he looked at me with clear eyes (full hearts, can’t lose) and reminded me I’d dreamed of an eagle the night prior and since then I haven’t stopped thinking about flying.

I’ve been spending the bulk of my days reading and writing and working and running and laughing and being happily highly caffeinated. I collect slivers of sunlight for less bright days, but in this valley of apples I’ve found I never have to wait too long for the light to come rushing back if ever it’s gone. The sun comes to dance here almost daily, giddily cascading, cannonballing, catapulting itself into windows and foothills and upturned faces. Soon enough with prolonged light warmth too will come skipping, clipping winter’s frosty heels, and already I can feel the gentle touch of fall soft and sure against my skin. Already I can hear fingers reaching for the edge of a page where another chapter’s ended, and another’s about to begin.

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."
-Carl Sagan

Why, those catalysts

The text describes a landscape beyond death. The plot is coincidental; the episodes are past - the explosion of a memory in a deceased, dramatic structure.

A little dose of objectivism

Physical force is nowhere near as effective as the miscreant quality of a persuasive word, an aimed whisper. A tug and a pull can only shift a human being so far, but noxious ideas can wrap their grip stealthily around convictions and determinations, molding them into submission.

Never submit. Never give in. You own the rights to every action that moves your muscle and bends your bone. You hold value in your own palm and you are free to toss it aside or grasp it unrelentingly. It's yours, yours, only yours.

The loss of all things

You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a year, but you are aging, and your body is degrading. As your cells synthesize the very proteins that allow you to live, they also release free radicals, oxidants that literally perforate your tissue and cause you to grow progressively less able to perform as you did at your peak. By the time you reach 80, you will literally be full of holes, and though you'll never notice a single one of them, you will inevitably feel their collective effect. Aging and degradation are forces of nature, functions of living, and understanding them can be as terrifying as it is gratifying.

I think urban exploration - exploring abandoned buildings and locations - is a step toward that understanding-- the building itself is not so much a built environment as it is a victim of this force of nature, this inevitable decay of all things, from memory to physical matter, made manifest in peeling paint, crumbling staircases, sagging floors. Some decay more quickly and violently than others, surviving barely a year before being subsumed by silence and warping, while the longest endure for well over several decades, fading into a far-off, barely perceptible memory.



The process of climbing through windowpanes and broken down doors may be the hook for many explorers, but the buildings themselves are the reward. Even the sound - ethereal silence so fluid that the listener scarcely registers the fact that it's nothing but many hundreds of repetitions of wind. The sound of silence, the sound of your own soft footsteps on broken glass and dust. The clicking of flashlights, on and off, on and off. Your breath meddling in the rhythm of the wind straying in through windows that haven't been boarded yet. The inevitable fate of places like this creates a fragility about derelict areas and a sense of urgency to capture them, knowing they can never be replicated again (unlike the developments that often replace them). The structures created by human beings have not only emancipated themselves, they have pushed their creators to the margin or completely out of the picture, because a world without people, a nightmare for our egocentric consciousness, would not be a terror for the nature surrounding us, but a blow of liberation.

In essence, these floors and staircases and hallways use nothing so much as the passage of time as their instrument, and the result is the most amazing adventure I can ever ask for, an encompassing dreamworld as lulling as it is apocalyptic. As time - months, years, decades - winds on over the structures, fragments are lost or dulled, and the details become ghosts of themselves, tiny gasps of dormant material groaning to life amid pits of near-silence. Walking through the hallways and opening long-closed doors, I find the deepest sense of peace and serenity I've ever felt, walking amongst creaking floorboards and stray light, infiltrated with particles of dust as ephemeral as the atmosphere itself.

I can see my life from here.

midnight.

It's the details that show us what it really is to scream love, to scream life, to scream 'Yes, now, I finally choose to live!'

The choice is based on sheer and ruthlessly intolerable insanity, but it's a choice nevertheless. Why, I'll feel the shards of burnt orange and sharp Pacific. The loneliness that seeps from the cement and echoes flawless, fabricated leather. Paranoia subdued and carelessness ignited like those prolific streetlamps, burning bright, bright, dull, dull, atmospheric like individual Jupiters along the lines of civilization that doesn't sleep. They don't falter and this, too, is in the details. The finite textures of the sky and its tangible closeness. The streetlights bring the universe closer to me and that is where I choose to live in the universe.

Let it be what it is.

The usual blasphemy.

Let it be said, with considerable certainty, that I have never held a particularly strong belief in God, Allah, Jehovah, or whatever it is people refer to their supreme being of choice as these days.

I was raised in a Jewish household, but it was only Jewish in the capacity that there was a half-assed menorah for a little over a week in December. We, as a family, attended Temple only twice during my entire childhood, both times as a favor to a friend of my father's. My best memories of my family's short-lived piety was a moderately entertaining sermon, and then a speaker that bored me to tears. I left both times with no intention of returning for anything but business (I worked at temple as an arts and crafts assistant for a few years – but any real Jew will tell you that money is money).

I remained a borderline Jew for several years. I said my prayers before bed until I was roughly ten; blessing my meals before eating (if I even remembered the correct words in Hebrew) petered out around eleven. As I slacked on my religious obligations, I couldn't help but notice that the threatened repercussions of not honoring God had yet to show themselves. Like a willful toddler testing the limits of a permissive parent, I pushed the envelope.

My first forays into atheism were under the guise of humor. I wrote and drew comics, and in one of my stories, the main characters would burn fifty gasoline-soaked garbage bags, filled with aborted fetuses, on the front lawn of the Vatican (I know, right?). ("We baptize you with FIRE! SOULS FOR THE CHURCH! SOULS FOR THE FUCKING CHURCH!") I penciled the page, inked it, lettered the dialogue in, and sat back to await the impending lightning bolt.

Nothing.

It was at this point that I decided that, if there was indeed a God, he was failing miserably at impressing me... which I imagine would be really a very simple thing if he was all-powerful. He couldn't spare a single precious moment on his infinite calendar to nudge me back onto the Straight and Narrow? Curious. I'm certainly not hard to please; a burning bush on my nightstand would have been more than enough.

My sacrilegious cartooning continued, much to my parents' ire. My mother, most notably, attempted to tear the original pages of one of my more disrespectful works. Beyond that, no repercussions were visited upon me, much to my amusement.

My festering disbelief in God became full-blown upon my graduation from high school and enrollment in college. However, the school I've chosen to attend is occasionally rife with Christian activity. It reached a point with a mostly-unobtrusive, but very unnecessary, older man with a sign reading: “JESUS LOVES YOU!!!!!!!!!!”, or something to that effect. There may have been more exclamation points.

And it makes you wonder... what sort of belief system needs badly-drawn cardboard signs and persistent men insisting that Jesus is your savior? It's absurd. The culture surrounding religion, the restrictions, the mindsets, the intolerance, the unwavering conviction that they are RIGHT – I want no part of that. I want to learn about the universe and all of its histories and possible inconsistencies and not swallow the “shit, man, God went and dunnit” explanation.

Fox News ran a program (contradictorily) titled "Facts, Faith, and Miracles.” The program attempted to explain the talents of great scientists, artists, and composers through "God." As in, their ability was so mind-boggling great that only "God" could be behind it.

My mother happened to be watching it at the time. I told her that the program was an insult to those great achievers and their ability because it was blatantly not giving them credit for their accomplishments, for the brilliance of their minds, and instead insisting, with absolutely no consideration or basis of intelligence, that it all must be attributed to a mysterious, disembodied force that “blessed” them. It sickened me.

I choose to believe in people and their ability to achieve amazing things and come to “moral” (whatever the shifting standard for that may be at the time) decisions not based on fear of an eternal punishment, but on their own thinking and reasoning. (Most) humans are fully capable of this. I do believe that religion is an insult to those who follow. It's an insult to their own independence and their own ability. Very recently someone on my Facebook friends list updated her status: "_____ got an A on her history test and is thanking God for His help!" I can't even begin to understand how that is not insulting one's mind. Your knowledge and your hard work got you that A -- not an invisible "being." It's undermining your own ability by willingly bestowing credit on someone/thing else. Respect yourself, jeeesus.

Sure, these may be slight or even insignificant reasons to fully reject a social paradigm, but trust me, I have countless more reasons for not having faith. It's a matter of listing them all.

*To my religious friends who I might (...probably) have offended: There will be opposition to anything you or I say, always. It hardly matters who says it.

*This might be kind of a circlejerk, yeah.

*P.S. RAmen, his Noodly Appendage.