March 1, 1930

The sense of being led by an unseen hand which takes mine while another hand reaches ahead and prepares the way, grows upon me daily. I do not need to strain at all to find opportunity. Perhaps a man who has been an ordained minister since 1914 ought to be ashamed to confess that he never felt the joy of hourly, minute by minute—now what shall I call it?—more than surrender.

It is a will act. I compel my mind to open out toward God. I wait and listen with determined sensitiveness. I fix my attention there, and sometimes it requires a long time early in the morning to attain that mental state. I determine not to get out of bed until that mind set, that concentration upon God, is settled. It also requires determination to keep it there. After a while, perhaps, it will become a habit, and the sense of effort will grow less. But why do I harp on this inner experience? Because I feel convinced that for me and for you who read there lie ahead undiscovered continents of spiritual living compared with which we are infants in arms.

But how “practical” is this for the average man? It seems now to me that yonder plowman could be like Calixto Sanidad, when he was a lonesome and mistreated plowboy, “with my eyes on the furrow, and my hands on the lines, but my thoughts on God.” The millions at looms and lathes could make the hours glorious. Some hour spent by some night watchman might be the most glorious ever lived on earth.

- Frank Laubach

http://www.mrrena.com/2002/lau.shtml

http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2008/07/18/render-unto-washington/

Sincerity isn’t the sort of thing that seems to be contagious. People rip off their employers–they’re poor stewards of the property of others unless there’s something in it for them. People who call themselves religious or Christian seem especially prone to public humiliation. When they are revealed to not be followers of Christ (in practice, this means they have broken some of the rules for living life that they have preached), people see that Jesus Christ is not a real person and that He does not grant all of his followers the power to resist temptation. This is true but it’s also a matter of perspective. I don’t think people have the right to judge others for failing to live up to their personal high standards if the people doing the judgment don’t have equally-high personal standards. The actions of a follower should have no bearing on the integrity of the leader, but in reality we don’t think that way. Maybe it’s impossible for us to separate the actions of followers from the will of the leader who is supposed to be responsible for all the actions of his followers.

I believe in the total sovereignty of God, so I believe that God reserves the right to tempt and withdraw temptation as he pleases. Who are we to say that we are free to make our own decisions? That’s arrogant. We are not truly “free” if we are constantly under attack by emotions and temptations that we can hardly control. We only have a degree of freedom. It’s not like we can fly or breathe water or anything. If emotions can do so much to affect our decisions, then who are we to say that we are independent entities like little gods, unaffected by anything, impartial arbiters of the truth at any given moment? Emotions could be sent by God. Why should people fall in love, or care more for a red candy than a green candy when they both taste the same? People can’t justify their desires with words, which means we can’t understand or communicate the meanings of things like that.

There has to be an intersection between the natural and supernatural when it comes to our minds and our thoughts and feelings. If there wasn’t then God wouldn’t be able to hear our thoughts or the prayers that we say without talking aloud.

Essentially, I think that what our emotional weakness accomplishes is to make us completely dependent on God’s mercy, and it forces us to pray to him. If we are not Christians, then we will become dependent on something other than God’s mercy. We will run to substitutes. Christians also run to substitutes. All Christians I’ve known including myself valued their time and comfort and future happiness (by an earthly standard) more than God’s happiness. It’s natural to think that way.

In ways we cannot understand, prayer actually affects what God allows to happen. It’s not that we control God or have actual supernatural power within ourselves, but that God allows us to influence his control over events through our faith (revealed in our prayers) that God controls events. The act of praying reveals our faith in God. Of course, I don’t live up to what I have just said here at all. Every prayer I pray is 99.99 doubt. I know it. I don’t feel worthy to have my prayers heard. Even when I do feel worthy I still pray out of desperation, out of having no other options. I also pray out of habit at certain times and not because I feel closer to God during those times. (Refer to Miracles by C.S. Lewis.)

I find it difficult to believe that God is who he says he is– a father who is capable of doing anything he wants for my good. Possibly this is due to my mental image of my earthly father. I treat prayer as too much of a ritual, as something I have to do because the Bible says to pray without ceasing. It’s not like the words I say have meaning other than the meaning in my head, and thankfully God can interpret the intended meaning so we don’t have to worry about misspeaking unless we’re with other people (and then we can have insincere prayers.)

When I pray it forces me to think of (reminds me of) a word and a concept called “God” but the God that I envision is usually not the God of the Bible. It is not a great true God, but a little god, a servant to me. It’s somebody who’s willing to listen to me no matter what I say, and I’m willing to abuse that privilege as long as I get what I want out of the deal–actions, results, stuff, whatever. The whole idea that being a Christian is a “relationship”, a “walk”, a “growing closer” to Christ, means that being a Christian is not a one-way deal. We don’t ask and receive, receive, receive. Jesus also asks, and what he asks for is absolutely insane. He asks to be followed, and then he asks us to give, give, give, which is paradoxical, because in order to give, there must be somebody who needs to receive. Bingo. That’s why I’m a Calvinist– it justifies the existence of evil by putting the blame for it on God. I like to think that God has a purpose for allowing some people to suffer and some people to not suffer.

Perhaps we don’t receive what we want because we don’t want what we’re supposed to want– in other words, we never gave Jesus what he wanted: ourselves. Too often in prayer I’m thinking mostly of what will benefit me. If Jesus was really important to us, if we knew that he could save our life, then we would be willing to do anything (kill, cheat, steal, insult, love) to get closer to him, because we will see that the only true joy is a gift that Jesus gives to those who are close to him. (People get involved in protesting against wars only when there is a risk that they will be drafted to fight them. Only when it becomes a personal problem do people truly feel what it is like to care about something, and then feel compelled to take action.)

We don’t give God our entire souls. We keep something back. We keep our souls for ourselves and we can’t help it. It’s as if God wants us to pray (ask him) to take from us what was his to take in the first place–our souls. It’s as if he wants our permission before performing the life-saving surgery that he was capable of doing at any time. I find it fascinating that God keeps the souls of the martyrs under his altar. It’s as if only those who are “slaughtered because of God’s word and the testimony they had” have truly given their entire selves up to God’s control. (Revelation 6:9)

People who say they can separate their public and private lives, or school and home life, or friends and family lives, are saying that they can do the impossible. Politicians who say that religious belief and private life and public action are each different sides of their life are insincere. Everything is inseparable. You can’t compartmentalize chunks of your life, hiding some things in closets and under beds while putting others on display in the family rooms and kitchens. The hidden areas will spill over into the light. The skeletons in the closet will come out. You can’t push some segments of society to the outside and expect them to stay there. You can’t hide homeless people by telling them to keep moving.

(Ever notice how you can’t see your own brain– the part of you that you assume is doing your thinking for you, the seat of your intelligence, the control center for your body?)

You can act 90% sincere and people can still detect that 10% of insincerity. To be completely sincere, you have to be transparent, but there are so many stupid reasons why this is not feasible in this world. Here’s an informal brainstorm that makes little sense.

1. Time. Learning about other people, listening to people explain themselves, listening to the perspectives of critics and observers–it all takes time. Lots of time. I think that God made people weak and capable of only loving one person at a time so that people would learn to be interdependent and also have to experience incredible amounts of pain and stress. You can’t love a big group (such as a nation) except in theory. “I love America” does not mean you love all the individuals in America. You love the idea that the group members are supposed to represent as individuals, but you know that in practice their lives fall short of the ideal American life (if there even is such a thing, but if there wasn’t then how would it be possible to “love America”?)

2. Greed and pride and envy and competition.

3. Emotions.

4. Ugliness. Nobody wants to be known as ugly. Is it insincere to want to look “good”? We wear clean clothes and not dirty clothes and that is a conscious decision that we hope will make us appear better to other people. Jesus was always wearing white clothing. He could have worn black, but he wore white. It’s an image thing. In Jesus’ case, at least his personality and attitude matched the image that his clothing portrayed. He slept well in the midst of a storm. Kings wear glory-inducing costumes and crowns that are more awesome than the person under it all.

5. Perception. If I think you are insincere even when you think you are being honest, then clearly one of us is wrong. If you really are honest, but other people always mistake you for acting insincere, then what in the world are you supposed to do? Start acting differently so they will think that you are sincere, even when acting differently makes you feel insincere? Gah. Who are ‘you’? The sum of what people think of you, or the sum of what you think that other people think of you, or the sum of what you think of yourself? Jesus tells us that we have planks in our eyes when we see splinters in the eyes of others. We can’t see into our own eyes so we need other people to tell us that we have splinters in our eyes. The splinters always turn out to be bigger than either we or the other people could have ever imagined.

To me, honesty is more important than Bible study. If you have Bible study with all the students hiding behind layers of pretense and everybody nodding along in agreement with the Word of God without wanting to understand what it means but only to get through the lesson or the class or the sermon, I can’t see how that doesn’t dishonor God. I’ve done that before.

Pretense can take many forms, not only the ones that people usually recognize. Pretense is formality and informality. Pretense is lots of small talk before getting down to business. Pretense is lots of business and little small talk. Pretense is clothing and speech patterns and terminology. Pretense is long prayers and short prayers, the singing of songs and the refraining from singing, the eating of food and the lack of food. Pretense is fellowship and the lack of fellowship. Pretense is handshakes and hugs and pats on the shoulder and smiles and grins and laughter both nervous and forced and enthusiastic. It’s something I have to live with, not something I can change or put an end to.

I think trust is far more beneficial than Bible study. Trust is the basis for love, isn’t it? The Bible study, the Sunday school class, the baseball game, the anything else is incidental as long as people are learning how to trust one another. This is why I hate the public schools that I attended. A lot of the procedures of school life unintentionally taught me that conformity to a group-determined standard would serve as a societal basis for trust, i.e. you can trust the one with a college degree more than the bum on the street, or the president more than the prostitute, or the owner of an Audi more than the owner of a Hyundai, or the one who smiles more than the one who does not smile. The Bible is full of surprising stories where the messed-up person is also more trustworthy and righteous than other people.

Speaking of which, you might as well kill yourself and consign yourself to hell than go before the Lord with a “sacrifice” and an “offering” of fellowship for him if you are not right with the people who you can see and who are right in front of your face. If you can’t take care of people who are real to you, you can’t take care of God who is not real to you. The Bible is full of admonitions to take care of widows and the orphans and the poor and not to forget them. Your sacrifice may take the form of time or money or labor, but it’s nothing but smoke to God if it’s not delivered from a heart that actually wants to get closer to God. In fact, doing a sacrifice although your mind is not prepared to offer it is sin because it leads people to think that it is okay to do sacrifices even though your mind is not prepared. People are watching you and they might follow in your footsteps. Now you’re responsible for a whole family line of the same mistake through multiple generations. Sacrifice all you want but if you didn’t actually mean it to improve your “fellowship with God”, it won’t help you. It may make you feel better for a while but just wait and the pain will come back with a vengeance. And even if you mean it in the right way, there’s no guarantee that God won’t give you what you don’t deserve. There’s a reason why Job cursed the day of his birth. It makes us angry when we realize that we were always powerless to protect the people who we loved.

We always were weak but we liked to think we were strong. That’s insincerity.

In FLCL Haruko tells Naota that nothing will happen until he swings the bat.

I used to really enjoy rainy days. Then I realized that to be an adult achieve my goals I would have to drive a car in the rain. That changed my perspective, or at least I let it change my perspective. I wish I didn’t have to care.

I have to believe that there is a reason for everything. If I stop believing, I will have no reason for optimism and no hope.

I was one of those kids who always rushed to get to the swings on the playground at the sound of the recess bell. Sometimes I was alone at the swings until people had eaten lunch but to deal with the aloneness I imagined that there were others at other schools who did the same thing and it was only chance and circumstance that had decided that they would go to their schools and I would go to mine. That was in the second grade.

I’ve always thought too much. The only thing I’ve learned from thinking is that I’d rather not have to. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a housecat and lounge around all day doing nothing? Actually, no. That wouldn’t work. I’d end up thinking too much since I didn’t have anything else to do, and then I’d get depressed and anti-social and not want to be around people anymore because I’d secretly think myself superior to them.

I don’t like secrets. In heaven my ideal world, all walls are made of a glass-like material.

At least I’m aware of a contradiction. Is that a start?

This reminds me of something that bothers me. I don’t like how reviewers of books or movies or music or anime or games or anything else seem to feel obligated to deprecate one thing in the course of explaining just how great another thing is. It’s as if to say that one thing is “good”, they have to invent a difference by saying that another thing is “bad”. Sometimes they’re sneaky and instead of using the word “bad” they use the word “worse” and the word “superior”. Being impartial means limiting your use of words like that unless they are fully qualified, and in most cases they aren’t. Or they compare the gameplay of a new game to the gameplay of an old game that back in the day would have been fairly decent gameplay. Honestly, are you going to tell people that arcade games like Pac-Man are junk because they didn’t incorporate 3D graphics? Now bugs are one thing and gameplay another. Also, it seems to be a trend nowadays for reviewers to fling insults around when pumping up the virtues of a favored thing. I hate reviewers that are judgmental in stupid ways. People should judge things on their own merits instead of only or mostly comparing them to other things. There’s a place for comparison, but don’t overdo it. The constraints are different, so you should take that into consideration. Maybe people like doing this because it allows them to pad their articles with words without actually saying anything useful. It’s as if by talking about other things you can talk about the thing itself without actually describing it and spoiling anything–witty metaphors and all that. Final Fantasy game reviews are easy; just list references to other FF games ad infinitum. In general all you have to do is reference the director/developer/label/president and insult their intelligence and question their sanity. But that sort of reviewing style requires the reader to have familiarity with the other things that are referenced. If not, the review is almost worse than useless–a waste of time and brainpower, overly loaded with references that are obscure except to the true fans. It also reveals a certain arrogance on the part of the reviewer, in that everybody is expected to have the wisdom of the reviewer. I don’t mind references but if they can’t stand on their own then they’re not useful for a review. Of course a movie is going to compress a story more than a twelve episode TV show. Of course that will affect the details and limit story development, but a story can be equally well-told regardless of whether it is told in one hour or six hours. One director’s interpretation of the same story may be as good as another, but it will inevitably emphasize certain points that the other ignores. And what’s wrong with authors or musicians completely “switching gears” and making something that is different from what they have made in the past? The difference between the past and the present is not grounds for disliking the current work. It’s as if people feel more comfortable rewarding sameness and monotony and uncreativity. Seriously, why do people feel this instinctive need to classify people into categories? Is this because Adam was ordered by God to name (classify) the animals? Is it human nature for us to immediately try to “place” people upon meeting them or learning about their interests? “Christian” music is that sort of categorization that doesn’t make sense to anybody. What’s “Christian” music nowadays if not music that some Christians but not all Christians will find acceptable? The “Christian” label on music only scares non-Christians away and attracts Christians to music that just might be as crappy as the music on so-called non-Christian music labels. It’s not even logical, the sorts of criteria people use to justify their judgments. But having said all this, if a review isn’t personal opinion, then what good is it? The only way we can possibly judge anything is in comparison to some ultimate (if arbitrary) standard. I suppose that we expect “good” reviewers to share certain aesthetic standards, but they cannot possibly have a basis for their standards outside of their own minds, since it’s art and the definition of art we’re talking about here, and not even all the philosophers in the world can define art in a way that satisfies even a majority of people. Give up on reviews then? No, because we can’t afford to. We need reviews because we don’t have enough time and money to purchase and watch and play everything. Therefore we need something to look to for guidance when we choose how we will entertain ourselves.

Now that we’re past my rant about bad journalism/editorial/reviews, here are my definitions. Depression is when you look at things and immediately see problems, dangers and the trouble they can cause. Normal is when you look at things and immediately see them as helpful and useful and “good” and full of potential for improvement. Normal is the way a child sees the world–as an amusement park full of wonders to become happy about. Depressed is when you see glamour and life, and get unexcited because it seems so fake and transitory.

I’d see a blade of grass and the first thing that I’d think of is how it would die and turn to dust. I’d see food and immediately think of how sick it might make me if I ate it, or how I would eat it and enjoy the flavor, but then the flavor would disappear forever and a few hours later I’d feel hungry again, never satisfied. I’d also think of how disconnected I was from the processes that produced the food, as in the farmers and factories and ranches and distribution networks of trucks and ships, and it would make me feel both useless and dependent since I rely on something that I don’t understand and have nothing to do with for the food that keeps me alive. I’d see an advertisement all colorful and flashy, and I’d think of how people are going to spend money because they think they need something, and how they might go into debt and turn into slaves to their things/gods/idols, and it would make me sad–I’m not sure why. I’d see a computer and I’d feel bad for being so dependent on it. I’d see a book and feel sick that people can’t talk to each other about those sorts of things and instead must turn to silent books to get the information that they want, reading by themselves, disconnected from any relevant connection that those articles might offer the reader to the outside world.

In recent days I’ve been playing Pokémon too much. I’ve decided to stop playing it for more than thirty minutes per day. It’s the only game I still allow myself to play, and the only one that I want to play.

Is this a part of getting older, or does everybody feel this way? I can hardly eat anything anymore without feeling sick after. I’ve given up caffeine entirely. That means no soda or coffee or energy drinks with caffeine. I’ve vowed to not eat food from McDonald’s or Burger King ever again because I’ve felt sick to my stomach while eating the food. It’s not that the food gave me food poisoning, it’s that the food itself causes bad digestion.

I think I’ve learned that when writing stories, I have to write drafts hundreds of times before I figure out exactly what I want to say. Then it becomes easier to write. I like the new direction that my story is going.

I really like the lyrics from the song Viridian City. They seem to express a story that I’ve always wanted to act out.

I left my home and now I see a new horizon (horizon)
But one day I’ll come back to Pallet Town (I’m comin’ back, comin’ back)
I’m on the road to become the greatest trainer
And I won’t quit until I’m number one

We keep on trying, then we try some some more
We stay together and find a place worth fighting for

I’m on the road to Viridian City
Meet my friends along the way

Tributes have been pouring in for a student and his mother who died in a motorway crash hours after he graduated from university with first class honours.

Ben Dalah, 21, from Edgware, his mother Nadia, 50, and father Freddy were travelling back from Birmingham University when their Saab was hit by a lorry and another car on the M6. Mr Dalah, 53, who was driving, received minor injuries in the crash on Friday afternoon. Friends told today how having received a First in economics, Ben was preparing to travel before taking up a graduate job at leading consultancy company Deloitte.

One if his closest friends, who met him while studying in Birmingham, said: ‘Graduation was the proudest day of his life. He always said that a 2:1 was enough for him but he worked to get the First for his parents.

‘He worked so hard to get it and nothing was going to stop him. Ben would spend from eight in the morning until ten at night in the library working.

‘He was a very determined and competitive person and always talked about wanting to find one thing in the world that he was best at.

‘I know his parents were extremely proud of him - they couldn’t stop talking about him.’ He added that Arsenal fan Ben had just returned from a holiday to Croatia with a friend and was looking forward to going to Thailand.

‘Ben was such a great friend and loved by so many people because he was generous, caring and would do anything for anyone. He will be greatly missed by everyone.’

- From The ‘amazing mother’ and her ‘brilliant’ son killed in car smash just hours after he graduated with first class degree.

I don’t understand all the terms used in the above article but stories like this one make me feel absolutely depressed. I would rather not die in an automobile accident. I would much rather die while fighting for some cause that I believe in. That’s a glorious death, a death that means something to those who are still alive. But to die unintentionally seems like a waste of life, and a way of life that requires people to risk their lives by driving seems to me to be a system that cheapens the value of life. It makes me sad because there’s nothing I can do about it except to accept it.

Telepast

Vrioom-vrioom go the motorcars
in constant motion on the deadbeat track
plunder and loot, a village pillaged
oil stolen and computers jacked
I had a dream last night and
it certainly was strange
I was the hero and the heroine
was the hired maid
but the maid was once my friend and I
didn’t know where to begin
in relating said story to another
because parts of it were still unripe
like yeti fruit plucked from a luminous tree
in my random access memory
I remember each TV show I have ever watched
better than the moments I have spent with you
and whispered imaginings lost their virtue
as they receded beyond the hairlines.

The eyeliner; I can tell you need it,
your eyes are red like dirt.
But I remember when you only needed
to smile at me to get me to see
a present-day princess reflected in my
eyes like television camera lenses,
wide and biopic.

One day they’ll write stories about you,
if one day your stories become famous.
Spin, rinse, dry. Not anymore, you won’t.
Vrioom-vrioom wheels spinning out,
one snaps and makes a descent into a pit
too deep and dark to see the bottom of.

Telepast 2

Children grow up seeing screen visions and wanting to be just like them;
guess it can’t be helped / It was like a bad dream that I soon forgot
and probably shouldn’t have / You spend your life looking at portraits
you forget that real people don’t stand still, you spend your life watching
action movies, you forget that real people aren’t always in motion.

Typo

We’ll wish upon the same star and then I’ll heartlessly forget that I ever knew you, because that is who I really am. Behind my masks and put-ons, there is a part of me that no fellow human being may see.

Behind me, Satan. In front of me, despondency and reasons for utter despair. If I stand still, I may forget that I ever wanted to move on. I am not a typo. I am not a mistake or the sum of my mistakes. I am not a doll. I am a means by which you can show God’s love to a fellow human being. If you don’t see me as such, then how dare you call yourself a follower of Jesus Christ. Forgiveness is the one thing in the universe that can make me cry. All people deserve to die, but only a few are gifted with the painful drawn out deaths that they deserve.

When you’re half-asleep there’s only one way to find out if you’re awake, but sometimes that way is not available to you.

The Rash

Ten plus seven and now there are too many
because we don’t have enough work for all of them to do.
We waste this time together and it isn’t doing for me
any of the homework that I’d rather burn with ashen tips of incense sticks.
We have to assign seats and lectures to occupy their fervent
worshipful minds, and so we assign them new lives and lines.
Take, put on, try these hats for size, we suggest if you do not want to get suspended.
The uniforms are not guaranteed to fit and if they do, you might get a rash
if you stop wearing them too suddenly. Air flow and that. It’s cooler if
you let us run the universe in which you co-exist with us; cede your power.

Verdant

To live the life of kings.
Headdressed guards with trailing coats
on patrol aside the rose hedges.
You might run across a queen or future king
as you run between classes listening to voice mail.

Your hobby is finding perfect flowers,
then neatly cutting all the thorns from the stems and branches,
and when you make an incision too deep,
you regret and you won’t take that sort of risk again.

Only the memorable moments remain in the midst of your mind.
Only the moments spent with other people still exist,
continual, subject to recall and remembrance.
The ones when you are all alone;
even then there is another present (or the vision of),
closely attached like a liver or a spleen or a diaphragm.

You shone verdant, and we drank
ginger ale under a red awning at a useless cafe
with a name that I forgot but not the look
on your face. That will stay with me like the effects
of old age and the shameful choices I’ve made.

Provost

It’s appetite-draining like ten-day-old bread to have nothing to do and nobody to talk to. When you look all around and see only walls, empty and spacious like yellow dunes of sand, pastoral landscapes and portraits of yourself in frames, it gets unnerving. It makes you want to cry when you realize that this is not a dream–that this is very real and you get only what you bargain for and that you will always be a complete failure when it comes to bargaining to your benefit. You rip yourself off, essentially, and you are happy to let people rip you off, because you feel as if you are doing them a necessary favor. Secretly you realize that no matter what you do it will go unappreciated by the ones you do it for. It makes you not want to live, anymore.

It’s only that you didn’t want to feel alone that you went to the trouble of hanging portraits on the wall of the people that you loved. Your confidence was mostly sham to convince certain people that you loved them, and when it failed you found yourself moving to another town and another social circle of friends, friends all, the bonds between you as solid as the wind on a day when there is no wind and no sky to be seen.

It’s fun to hear from you. Explanations are forthcoming as a means of introduction, painless fearless fervent exchange like over-the-counter, no questions asked, eyebrows and voices raised together, spitting images, reminders of every single one from the past. It makes you so happy sometimes to talk that you can’t breathe. You run out of words to say how you feel because you want to be able to remember but can’t bear to spare your strength on such a selfish thought.

Purification. Stained glass distorts the light, but in such a way that you can see images via the light that would not be visible were it not for the filter of the murky glass. These images may guide you into a greater light. Impurification, like the way that God allowed the effects of the knowledge of good and evil to remain a corrupting influence. Truth ensnares us and lies make our hearts glad.

In your small world you are the king, the provost, the head and all the others are your subjects and tributaries. He made it sound so simple and you wanted to believe him, way back when you were young. You sound so confident all the time and people who lack social skills envy you for it and try to emulate your confidence. Suddenly you don’t want the meeting to ever end, and you think of new things to say only because you want to hear the other one speak. You stare and look for his reaction. You are oblivious to the obvious, like a sharp stone hidden in a morning fog. Clams conceal pearls, but you are a pearl concealing a clam. Very strange!

I always feel as if I have lost. That’s why I keep looking forward to what happens next. I live for and in the future because the present is always too full of painful memories for me to focus. I need to escape. It’s the confidence that attracts me to you, but confidence is what scares me the most. Can’t we all be pushovers and weak and indecisive and pointlessly selfish and unyielding?

It’s the ones who refuse to compromise who become dictators, and it’s the dictators that we tend to develop the most grudging respect for. Even if they are wrong, we feel as if they deserve to lead, and we choose to follow them despite our better judgment. We want to follow decisive people, not weak-willed people.

You’re mean and the wild animals retreat when the wind tells them of your arrival in their habitat. The wooden fences and stone walls are all in ruins. They lie flat after the passage of the hurricane. When things change they can’t ever be the same.

Car (1)

Long story short: The junk transmission in my car was replaced under warranty after four months of very intermittent transmission mallfunctions while driving. I quickly learned that there was no way for any mechanic to diagnose the problem unless the problem was actually taking place, and since the problem was infrequent, I had no choice but to drive the car to the point of breaking. Along with that fear came some mental breakdown.

I could see no way around it. If I wanted to get the car repaired under warranty, I would have to drive it to the point of breaking, because the mechanics could not diagnose the problem. I’d have to drive it on public roads knowing full well that I was driving a vehicle that was prone to sudden inabilities to accelerate–at highway speeds and up hills.

I had long arguments with God about the moral rightness of me driving an impaired vehicle simply to save money on replacing a transmission. But we’re talking a thousand dollar car part here. Is that what the life of some innocent driver is worth to me– a mere thousand dollars? I’ll do my best to drive safely, but there are no guarantees that my car will cooperate (I told myself), and with the tailgating ways of drivers around here, my greatest fear was driving up a slight grade or steep hill and the transmission problem kicking in and the car losing all acceleration and speed, causing a multi-car pileup on an uphill.

It was mental hell. Seriously. Being an adult has never been so unappealing to me before. But hey, that’s life. You’re born, you go to school, then one day things begin to get interesting. (That last line is, if I recall, verbatim from a US navy recruiting advertisement.) I’m being sarcastic, of course. Things don’t get interesting. Things just stay the same. There’s war, there’s peace, and a few people are just totally determined to get their names written in the history books. (I wish I had the guts to become an adventurer or a pirate or something. I totally do, but I’m afraid of getting in trouble with the law, of all things.)

I picked up my car from the mechanic after three weeks of having them test-drive it on a regular basis and finding next to nothing and diagnosing no problem and repairing no parts.

I was feeling very fatalistic when I drove all the way up to Ithaca, NY, by myself. I felt as if I might have been making a one-way trip, but what choice did I have?

This particular day was was a Monday, and I was determined to show my face at a certain place in Ithaca that I needed to visit. If I could not make it there, I had decided that life would no longer be worth living according to the old ways that I was used to. Something within me really wanted to keep living life in the old way and I told myself that if my car was to break down anywhere, I would walk or hitchhike or steal my way to where I needed to go. If my desperate circumstances led me into a life of crime, then I guess that would determine my destiny, and me and the law would be at odds for the rest of my life. All for a car, so I could live my life. (But is it really my life if I require things such as cars to live it? I shouldn’t think of myself as an individual, then, so much as a member of society, bound to service it in something close to feudal terms.)

It took me two hours to get to Ithaca. Along the way, the transmission problem began showing up intermittently but it seemed to be something I could control by not accelerating quickly, especially up hills. Turns out that Ithaca is surrounded by rolling hills– fun in theory and poetry but not if you’re driving over them along a narrow road with one lane in either direction. I felt terrible but I had no choice but to keep driving at overly cautious speeds. I was constantly afraid that some driver in a hurry would come up behind me, get stuck, and get impatient with me for going slow. That’s how concerned I am for the feelings of other drivers. I don’t expect them to be understanding; I try to be understanding of them. I’m the one at fault. I’m the one who doesn’t deserve to be driving because it’s my fault for driving such a broken car, and if I was smart, I wouldn’t be driving it at all.

Life doesn’t always give you the option of giving up. After getting a little lost but not in an unwelcome way, I bought a map at a gas station then found my destination and did what I needed to do there. Then I got back on the roads to go back to PA. I had gone down a very long steep hill going into Ithaca, but now I was driving up it.

It’s at times like that when I say the name of Jesus over and over, because when I can’t put faith in my car, I put my faith in the one who has the power to change reality so that nobody gets hurt.

Dream

It’s like a terrible dream in which I stand on the top deck of a sailing ship, a caravel. I stand over the captain’s quarters, and all is calm and peaceful although there is a hushed sense of foreboding among the crew. A captain comes up to me as the other crewmembers watch, and he offers me a choice between two or more “things”. I can’t remember what those things were or how they were relevant to anything. Perhaps it was to check one box instead of another, or to press a button, or to touch a steering wheel and turn in the right way. Whatever it was, I always chose very quickly and nonchalantly, and immediately regretted it. Suddenly the sky and the seas are stormy and a huge wave washes me overboard. I can’t do anything but splash and try to stay afloat because there is no scrap of wood or anything for me to hold onto. As I watch I hear the screams and dying gasps of drowning men, men whose lives depended on my decision, I realize that they are angry at me. Their last emotion before they die is hatred of me. I’ve betrayed them. If it wasn’t for me, they might have had a chance to live longer and enjoy more days of life on this earth, days full of work and pain and emotion.

I didn’t ask for this choice. I didn’t ask for this dream. I have no idea why I am on this ship, except that I belong there for some reason that I can’t say. But the choice is mine and always was my own. The captain had given me a choice between two or more choices, and only one was safe and correct and good. When I chose wrongly, I not only caused my own death, but the deaths of every other person aboard the ship.

What I’ve described was a recurring nightmare from when I was younger. The same dream, over and over. The same decision, carelessly made, causes lasting consequences for me and all the others.

Can you choose for me? I wonder. Can you take me up like a cause that is not lost? I don’t want to do anything wrong. The most loving thing I can do for those I love, I often think, is to leave them alone, to tell them never to look at me, because I don’t want them to learn to rely on me. Don’t rely on me for anything. Go away, or else I’ll go away, and although I can’t forget you, I will pretend that you don’t exist anymore, since when you aren’t in front of my face and subject to my touch I have no assurance that you are actually real, or that you ever existed. It’s easier to be alone. It’s easier to not have truly lived, to not have lived abundantly. Let me cling to my tiny household idols and my scraps of security blanket. I’m young but already I want to retire.

It’s situations like this that make people think that it would be easier to die. Life means you have a chance to fail and mess up and cause pain to others. But why, I ask God, why me? Why did I have to be born into this miserable world out of all possible worlds? I feel so limited, as if I was made to appreciate things on a higher level, but instead I find myself down here, entering into contracts I cannot keep, letting people down, disappointing myself, afraid to move, content to remain paralyzed and static because it’s safer. If I was never born, I would never have developed these emotional reactions. What hasn’t happened yet can’t possibly matter to you when you’re not around to react to it. Life is fighting–against nature, against injustice, against callousness. It’s hard. But what makes life feel easier is knowing that people are happy with you and approve of your actions. In that sense, everything I do is for the sake of my emotions. I drink water when I feel thirsty because I don’t want to feel thirsty anymore. I sleep when I feel drowsy because I don’t want to feel drowsy anymore. I stand up when my legs turn numb from sitting down, and I sit down when I’m tired of standing up. I let my emotions lead me along by a hook in my nose attached by a string held in their hands, and I feel glad for the privilege of being led.

Car (2)

The transmission problem is no longer intermittent, but constant. The engine is revving like crazy as if it’s stuck in low gear even though I’m not driving on an incline anymore. The check engine dashboard light has turned on. It’s gotten to the point where I will never get home today and will endanger hundreds of people if I continue to try to drive this vehicle. I pull over on the side of the road. This is just outside of Ithaca. My cell phone reception is non-existent, so I have to walk to somebody’s house and use their phone. It’s a cordless phone, and I stand outside and talk. I call my insurance company and arrange for a towing service. I call somebody who was relying on me to give him a ride to work and I tell him that I can’t because my car is broken. It’s ninety-six degrees and humid. A beautiful day. I go back to my car and stand on the side of the road for twenty minutes under the shade of a tree as I wait for the tow truck to arrive.

I was pleasantly surprised by the tow truck, which was brand-new. It took an hour and a half to get my car back “home” and the ride cost me over two hundred dollars out of my own pocket, above what the insurance company was paying. I said to myself, well, there goes my movie and eating out and clothes and game money for a year.

At last we pull in to the mechanic’s place and disembark from the tow truck. There was a nice hot summer wind blowing. The tow truck driver lights a cigarette and holds it in his mouth as he lowers the car from the truck. Tobacco smoke mixes with diesel exhaust. Two of the mechanics come out and walk up to me, saying nothing and appearing rather nonchalant. They know me by now. I mean, I don’t know if they know my name or anything, but I’m such a regular by now that they certainly recognize my face.

He says, “Only does it for you?” and I say, “Yeah.” That’s how it is. Without saying anything we both understand what they will do next with my car. My car is like a fixture at their place by now. They’re bound and determined to diagnose the problem and succeed this time around, and their job should be easier now that it completely refuses to run in high gear.

About twenty minutes later the mechanic gave me a ride home. That was good because mentally, I was ready to hitchhike home again, the way I did on a previous occasion when I left my car at that mechanic’s place.

To sum it up: Three weeks of having somebody else risk their life driving my car around at no cost to me, and the car refused to malfunction for them. But I get it back and find it easy to drive it into the ground. At least this time they were able to diagnose the problem and arrange for the transmission to be replaced under warranty. Recently I got my car back with the replaced transmission and it seems to be running fine, but the fear is still there. I keep expecting it to do something weird. It’s like I gained post-traumatic stress disorder about driving.

Car (3)

So now I get a little bit tense and distracted just from thinking about driving my car, and it makes me feel depressed. I think these are mild panic attacks. It really stinks to feel this way because I know it is holding me back in various ways. Not having reliable transportation or not feeling capable of relying on transportation is affecting my decisions and I’m wondering if I’m not getting a little bit irrational.

The day I got my car back, I almost died twice, both times when making left turns. The first time I was a passenger in somebody else’s car (going to the mechanic to pick up my car), and while the other two passengers remained silent, I practically whispered the word ‘whoa’, as if in awe of something, and that was enough to get the driver of the car I was in to stop pulling out into the road as a big gleaming pickup truck blazed by with its horn blaring. I saw it coming and the weird thing was that when I got home with my car, I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t said anything.

The second time was all my fault and I deserved to die. I mean, I wouldn’t have blamed anybody if I had caused an accident. I was turning left out of a gas station in a place where there wasn’t much visibility to the right and some car was speeding along far above the speed limit and I swerved into the other lane to avoid getting hit by it. There were no cars in sight in that lane and I got back into my lane in time.

I don’t know why– maybe it was nervousness– but with that new transmission in my car, it felt as if I was driving a car for the very first time, by myself. It was terrible. All my timing when making turns and accelerating felt off and I couldn’t tell how fast the car was supposed to accelerate or how the engine was supposed to sound or anything. It was as if I’d forgotten how to apply pressure to the gas or brake pedals and was slowly learning how all over again.

My greatest fear as an adult is the thought that by driving a car, I could cause injury or death to somebody who did nothing wrong except for thinking that the roadways were safe. I have a growing hatred for this system. Curse Ford for making the automobile the cornerstone of American society, displacing everything just to make a profit. If it wasn’t for cars, we wouldn’t have suburbs and rush hours. Curse Eisenhower and everybody since him for approving the interstate highway system and contributing to globalization and our current society in which we feel as if we can relate more intimately to a international brandname like Pepsi or Adidas than to some farm fifty miles away that grows the food that we eat to live. (After all, we see more commercial messages and experience more emotions about such branded products than about fresh vegetables.) Curse every weak-willed mayor and city council for improving the roads to a point where we can’t drive anything as slow as a horse; we risk our lives bicycling even in the bike lanes, we risk our lives crossing the street in marked crosswalks, and we risk our lives driving cars because the roads are all broken down and laws unenforced by the police. Curse all the times when the rules are bent, tweaked, or otherwise ignored in the name of love. I hate when I say things like this because it makes me sound like such an ungrateful and despicable person, but I guess I’m just obsessed with cause and effect. There are reasons why what we take for granted now used to not be taken for granted. If you hate the symptoms, you ought to hate the causes even more. I’m just trying to defend myself against a system that I cannot possibly influence in any practical way. I’m a licensed driver and I bet I’m better than most, but when it comes down to it, I’m not proud enough to say that I deserve to be on the roadways.

Car (4)

There are far more deaths on American roadways than deaths from terrorists in the world. I think that America should spend more money on ensuring the safety of American roads than on national defense, since the casualties of the road system are far higher than the casualties of terrorist attacks. American roads are more dangerous than anything the terrorists can throw at us, and yet we live in fear and get involved in foreign wars to defend ourselves from terrorists while leaving ourselves wide open to death by automobile? All the roads I’ve seen around here in Pennsylvania and New York are absolute crap. There are potholes on the interstate and I zip through them at seventy miles per hour because I don’t have a choice. It’s the only road I have to use and there are a lot of maniac drivers out there. We all use the same roads here and what makes me want to cry is knowing that most people don’t care. Most people take it for granted that this is how it is. They have no interest in changing things, or even living their life differently. I don’t want to be one of them.

A little part of me gets tired each time I drive my car. It’s a sick feeling, and then my thoughts get all depressive and sad, like I see something like a moth on the wall and my first thought is that it will die and turn to dust. Or I see people smiling and it reminds me of how little there is to smile about. And when the driving stops, and I can get out of the car I feel good all of a sudden, like I could just dance for joy in the front yard, and if somebody were to stop and stare at me, I could tell them to join me, because I’m so glad to have survived another holocaust of car fumes and jangled nerves and crushing anxieties.

Maybe I just find it impossible to put my faith in a piece of machinery unless the radio is playing loud music or other people are talking with me to keep me distracted. Do you ever think about what a motor vehicle really is? You are sitting behind a container for tiny controlled explosions, and below you are all of these metal and rubber objects spinning very fast and getting relatively hot. All of it is automated and mechanical and explainable, but if one component breaks, the whole thing could blow up. I wish I had lots of money to throw at some reliable honest mechanics so they could tell me what’s going to be next to break on my car, but I guess I’ll just drive it until it breaks while I’m going down the freeway since that’s what I’ve always done and it’s what other people do.

America’s government has no business fighting foreign wars by spending billions of dollars in borrowed money when the roadways in America are junk and more citizens are dying every day thanks to idiots with driver’s licenses and idiots who hold the reins of power yet would rather fight foreign wars than maintain America’s infrastructure–roads, power lines, stuff like that–than to terrorists.

I really don’t know what to do about bad drivers. If you are too quick to take a driver’s license away from a bad driver, you ruin their entire life because they need to drive a vehicle to work or get to work, and there might be hope of teaching them to drive better. To relate this to a Biblical metaphor for something else, it’s like taking a millstone away from a person as collateral for a loan. You might as well kill the person you are taking it from, because with it goes all hope of having food (flour?) to eat as a reward for hard work. Even if you are a hard worker, in our society you can’t get to where you need to go to work unless you have transportation. You just aren’t allowed to live next to where you work. Society isn’t set up that way.

Story

I’ve been trying to write one novel–one story– for the past six months. If this is as serious as I can get about writing, when the only real work I have to do involves driving around looking for a place to work, then maybe I don’t have the discipline that it takes to write stories for a living, or even for a hobby. My standard is this: It has to be the kind of thing that other people will find meaningful. I can’t just write stories off the top of my head– I mean, I could do it, and I could write a whole lot of words and get this great big random and wonderful plot going, but the idea comes first. The plot must completely match the idea. I cannot tell stories without abstracting the concepts. I think it’s cheap to write a story that shows, not tells. It may be more difficult to write, but it’s far more difficult to understand, and why write a story if you don’t want people to be interested in reading it?

But I’m still hopeful. I feel as if my whole life is a research project, and I may not be able to say what I want to say with the skill I want to say it in until I get older.

Happiness

If our minds tell us that we are happy, then everything else will seem to us to be okay–acceptable–reasonable–rational–useful–good. If bowing down to one idol makes us happy, then we will see no reason for bowing down to another idol. Maybe that’s why there are problems and strife in the world. When we are hit with weakness and sickness and then forced to see past the idols and really take a good look at ourselves in the mirror, we can’t help but dislike what we see. But we refuse to believe it. Everything we do is for ourselves, right? We do what we think is right, but only if we think it benefits us. If our masters really mistreated us beyond what we could bear, we would have rebelled against them. We would have staged an uprising and slain them with their own weapons. We would have done this for ourselves, to secure happiness for ourselves.

Games

Trading Pokemon on the GTS is oddly addictive. It’s fun to pull off quick successions of trades. Today I came across a Lv. 100 Dusknoir that somebody wanted to trade for a Lv. 9 or lower Chansey. So I checked the Chanseys that were on offer and traded my Miltank for one that was Lv. 1, then I immediately traded that Chansey for the Dusknoir.

In other news, last Friday I was up three hours longer than I anticipated. I was trying to catch a Drapion and I kept failing. I hate the Safari Game. I think it was past 3:30 AM when I went to sleep.

Everybody in his heart of hearts agrees with Baudelaire: “To be a useful person has always seemed to me something particularly horrible,” for, subjectively, to be useful means to be doing not what one wants to do, but what someone else insists on one’s doing. But at the same time, everyone is ashamed to admit in public that he is useless. Thus if a poet gets into conversation with a stranger in a railway coach, and the latter asks him: “What is your job?”, he will think quickly and say: “A schoolteacher, a beekeeper, a bootlegger,” because to tell the truth would cause an incredulous and embarrassing silence.
- From “Squares and Oblongs” by W.H. Auden.

“The thing that you thought you wanted–your desire for it was just a ruse to get you to fall into a different level than the one you had promised yourself you would stay on.”

“Oh? Then where did the desire come from?”

“The game designer put it there. He buried it and made you like a homing missile to find it. It’s a treasure hunt!”

“What is?”

“Quarries are deep. They have to be. It’s the only way to get the minerals out.”

“So you say… Hey, can you say what you mean instead of randomly jumping from topic to topic? I’d like to not have to interpret everything you say.”

“Sure thing. Simply put, you’re the quarry. But you’re on the up and up, just like the minerals.”

“That’s still unclear.”

“It’s called a parable. It’s where I use one set of images to suggest the existence of images that you have never seen and would be incapable of seeing were it not for the images that I give to you.”

“Huh?”

“Why do you think we have to live earthly lives before we get heavenly ones? There’s an important reason for that.”

“Do you know what the reason is?”

“No.”

With a sharp exhalation of breath: “What do you know, really?”

“Only what other people tell me. If my clothes are weird, it’s because the other people tell me so. If I smell bad, they avoid me. If I’m uncompliant and prone to complaining, people shun me. But at the same time, I’m telling them and avoiding and shunning them. Observing is the same as having a conversation. There are messages being sent with every fake smile and every real smile. The trouble is in the interpretation–which ones are real and which are fake?”

“Okay. That doesn’t answer anything.”

“Well, if you want to see where you’re going, you have to see where you’ve been. But that’s hard to do when you’re at the tip of the drill at the bottom of the pit with your nose to the grindstone. Try flying up and out of it like a retroactive eagle. Get sky high and hover and look down for a whole. That way a larger portion of the world will come into view, and you can aim.”

“Aim?”

“Always aim. Unless of course you like running out of ammunition before you’ve won the battle.”

“Uh, okay. I’ll do that.”

“See you later.”

***

I don’t know if antihistamines are having any effect on my allergies. I simply can’t tell. They haven’t been giving me side effects (well, last night I felt sick and had to stay awake until 3:30 in the morning after throwing up around one but that was the day I didn’t take the antihistamines.)

From the Churuya-san manga. That is all.

Oh, and in other news, I’m apparently allergic to the summer, or the United States, or something like that. Imagine that. For the first time I’ve been taking antihistamines! They’re making me feel the opposite of lightheaded, which is a heavy feeling, but marginally better than sneezing ten times in a row every few minutes.

After all this time, I’ve realized that that the only way to write a good story is to write around it with lots of silly essays and poetry and notes taken on index cards and songs and room redecoration and sleep. School, at least for me, never gave me that sort of leeway. It was always “I’m gonna revise this draft in Word over the next thirty minutes just to get it done on time since I’m already tired.” I can’t write using the computer anymore. I get all my original story ideas from scribbling on notebook paper and drawing lines and arrows to paragraphs and sentences that I’m scribbling in random directions in the margins because I’ve run out of space on the lines. It’s very confusing, so then I scrap it all and write it again mostly from memory, but on the computer this time, and it turns out better. So I’m using Word as a scribal device, to copy what I’ve already written into a usable form.

The story I’ve been working on is starting to develop concentric circles like growth rings. I’ve rewritten it so much, and each time it gets so much closer to okay that I have to wonder why I liked it before (it was because I was too lazy to rewrite). I think this is the best story in the world, because I’ve never read a story that is anything like it, and besides, this is the sort of story that I would want to read. All my characters are either crazy buffoons who want to take over the world, or apathetic “losers” who think about suicide even when they aren’t thinking that they’re thinking about it. Extremes of emotion, just like what’s his name– Shakespeare and his plays. I’ve got to finish my story tonight.

As a writer I decided that I need to develop some serious eccentricities. So I began sleeping on the floor. I will only sleep in a bed after I finish my novel, because only then I will be able to die with no regrets.

I drove up to Ithaca, NY. It’s absolutely insane. Think insane crossed with psycho. Think Fresno, only with more pedestrians and fewer parking spaces. It’s pedestrian-friendly, but at the same time, it absolutely isn’t. Think Cornell University eating the city alive. Think some would-be mass murderer buying control of the reins of government, then building a city from the ground up to cause immense amounts of mental stress to the inhabitants. I’m thinking of moving there because it is reportedly an extremely liberal city. A city like that makes me want to get up in the morning. I should enjoy it, in a “fighting against the system gives you something to get up in the morning for– wait a minute, you just like to see people get hurt” kind of way. I want to be part of the urban college town scene– start some protests, pull some all-nighters, sneak onto campus, plant some plants, audit some classes, break some legs, eat oriental food– and cheese! Maybe I can pull a David Crowder and start a church composed of wandering minds. At any rate, moving to Ithaca will get me that much closer to New York City, which is reportedly where everybody wants to live.

I saw fireflies for the first time the other night. At first I thought my eyes were seeing sparklies, like when I glimpse a bright light like the sun, then look away at something darker. Fireflies are very bright.

Giant Blue Earthworms and Friends

It’s not that we give in so much as we continually demonstrate that we have given up.

Reach for your wallet and let’s pull that fifty out. Let’s all watch a movie in which the heroes die because heroes live only to say goodbye, if only in their minds (as in the days of peace) to the ones they said they loved– which is why they get to die without ceremonial salve. To fill the gaps they leave in the social fabric, their friends will light tall candles and watch them burn and burn, making light and heat but nothing else– their potential future actions having been lost to this world.

But we will live like kings forever and pass nights awake in purple rooms where everything is clean and all the others, why, they can be unclean as they are with their animals as long as we’ve attained a place of safety and of comfort enlodged in the system our minds stratified and bent to the will of a demolition, an obliteration, a canceling out of what we would otherwise want– “for the good of the people” we accept domination.

We give our life over to an unseen entity and receive “security” in return, and whatever they tell us that “peace” is, is what it is, for the government makes the rules, the government is effectually our god and we are bent over backwards to follow its legalism, which is why in reality (but not in the law of the land, which is often arbitrary) there is no such thing as the separation of church and state. The government is the overconscience, the substitute for personal responsibility, the seemingly inevitable result of our unbelief, the children of Israel bowing down to the golden calf while Moses receives the law on their behalf from the I Am That I Am who is to us an idea because “idea” is our category for anything that we haven’t known with our senses; but unlike a mere idea, God is a living being.

We bow down to the unseen entity just by living here; there’s no free will involved. There are invisible claims on our lives–emotional obligations to friends, family, and anonymous people whom we are expected to help through our tax dollars and tax-deductible donations, along with laws and unwritten social rules–painful and cold like chains around the ankles to give us a feeling of security and future safety. It’s a guarantee backed up by nothing but the word of a god; paper money whose value is derived from the word of the Federal Government and not a precious metal that people value greatly; paper money on which the words “In God We Trust” appear, unique among the nations of the world. We automatically place our faith in ideas backed by ideas ostensibly backed by the faith of our leaders in the people backed up by the faith of the people in their leaders to do what is right. But there is no Moses to get the law from God for our nation, so we are all alone, abandoned.

We may believe in something other than what our government believes in. But our beliefs don’t matter, since we don’t act in accordance with what we believe since we can’t. We’re not allowed to. If our government believes that it would be best to subjugate us or another nation, our belief that it would not be best is made ineffectual by our simultaneous belief in our government. As long as we put our faith and trust in our government, we are the government, which means that every action good and bad caused by our government is in reality caused by us as individuals. We stand by idly and do nothing but observe, then when the collapse and the depression come to stay, we say that it was inevitable, and we write books to try to justify ourselves by pointing out the mistakes made by other people. We may like it when leaders and generals die for the mistakes that they ordered their people to commit, but ultimately they are the least liable people of all for their actions, since they never did anything other than talk and waste words, since only a fool of the highest ignorance would willingly obey commandments that he did not want to follow if he knew that by obeying them, he would cause injustice.

We are responsible for everything that happens in this world, so it is a lie propagated by government that only the government or the military or the leaders were responsible and that we ought to sit back and enjoy the ride and the comforts of home and prosperity in a society built on the back of wanton consumption, the rights to which our government and our military and our leaders guarantee to us.

Freedom is the antithesis of a strong government that wants to eliminate uncertainty and possibility. Freedom introduces uncertainty, which is why we all secretly want something we cannot attain except through forgetfulness of both the self and others. But we can’t forget both ourselves and others at the same time, not with these human bodies, unless we die and be reborn.

We are reaching for the stars with hands that can’t even grasp the air. Our minds are shot and our bodies in states of mortification and vicissitude. If our minds tell us that we are happy, then everything will be okay, even if we are doing things that we would otherwise not do because something is telling us to do them. That’s the deal.