Having perused your inside front page article this morning that in contemporary journalistic convenience skirts the topic of the current climate of racial divide I have fallen the victim of being encouraged to speak my mind about you and your associates. In the undying spirit of William Randolph Heart’s response to his ace photojournalist, Jimmy Hare, “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Well in your case, it seems to be, that you like many of your associates are furnishing the words so that the current administration can commence with their latest war. I realize all too well that jobs are hard to find but how about refreshing yourself with a little equanimity in terms of the true context of this story where we have an administration that consistently plays the race card whenever it gets into trouble. Just remember that you are not rated in the 47% that you pretend to represent with your shame cult utterances but rather in the 24% of those who spout embedded platitudes. Hopefully, I ‘ll see you on the unemployment line very soon.
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All posts for the month July, 2013
No matter how much I felt like trying to avoid it, I knew that I was doomed when I saw the rocket taking off in the distance. The slender pencil shape of the distant Redstone rocket that launched and misfired a mile or two away seemed to perfectly adjust to steer to my position on the clearing under the white canopy where I sat lounging upon the grass. I could feel the consternation of others of my party who being equally alarmed couldn’t believe my abject passivity to what appeared to be growing inevitability of the approaching doom. Yet they also were foolish enough to wait upon the signal of the demonstration of my own overt fear as an indicator to suggest the proper avenue of escape. Some finally took off in a variety of directions in an attempt to avoid the growing shadow of impending annihilation. Fate had applied a particularly perverse form of methodology to apply its judgement on my portion of the human ant kingdom. And though I was not one to willingly accept the vagaries of Fate’s decisive indifference, I would not be bullied by its suggested outcome attempting to easily manipulate the prerogatives of preserving my own existence.
The task of convincing ‘her’ that day seemed exceedingly prolonged and drawn out to the point that the process made me question the worthiness of enduring it through to the final outcome. These conversations wore on and I felt myself wandering for a time from the coffee counter of one store over to another coffee house cafe setting at the adjacent establishment. The extended conversation defaulted to Hitler’s boast that if he didn’t take the dangerous helicopter ride over the parade below and its accompanying cheering crowd, then who would? How its ending point fell upon the topic of matching Carolina blue plastic spoons to spaceships via the industrial process of injection molding defies any ability on my part to comprehend. I after all just found myself sitting there simply along for the ride.
The house sat upon a double sized lot that could survey open space that led to a panoramic view of the city int he far distance. The area might have been likened to a couple of different locales that he had known with greater familiarity during previous chapters of his existence. It would probably be evident only in hindsight that these other views were equally cogent and telling as to the mental makeup of his outlook on life. The patio of the house that he could recall from the start of adolescence. The stretch along the railroad line that his last greatest love and he would often tread. The house by the local country club that he occasionally pass by likening its abandonment and resurrection to the hopeful state of his own hopeful state for same.
The inside and outside of the setting seemed to meld as the patio contained many if not most of his most valuable possessions exposed to both elements and elemental view of wander alley borne passers by. This had not created any sense of contradiction in terms of fear of loss that overweighed some utilitarian convenience that keeping all these shelf bound curios in said exposed state. The real issue of immediate concern was how to make the appointment with his family despite warnings of incoming inclement weather. He gathered down a sighting glass and posited long and hard upon what other useful items might be leaned from this densely packed inventory. A quick peek around the back corner of the building revealed an amazing sight that would contradict not only his promise of an impending journey but suggest his immediate survival was dependent upon fast action to gain entrance to his basement.
There before his stunned gaze snaked an immense twirling cloud of angry black air stretching forth horizontally as if some terrible behemoth seeking prey. Behind it, the horizon had taken on an unexpected Payne’s grey angry demeanor. Despite the rapidity of the storms advance upon the vicinity, he became obsessed with which other items from the vertical cache of longtime treasures to grab and find quick refuge. The surrounding air went black in an instant as the winds hit turning visibility into a milkshake of disturbed soil and the discard of nearby airborne potpourri. The impact threatened his possibility of maintaining further balance and he had to drop what he had cradled in his arm in order to keep from being thrown immediately to the ground and tumbled away.
As with all things nocturnal and in the middle of the night, his subsequent journey found him in consort with the spirit of his deceased father, the two ventured out upon some indecipherable errand that might or might not have been completed. The time spent together was as usual, completely silent of conventional conversation though discourse seemed evident in common purpose. AS spirits came and went in such realms he was obliged to detrain sooner than expected. The lanes traveled found him left off not far from a former residence where he had to physically repackage a loaded sidearm,along with the accompanying holster and strap in such a manner to provide the minimum visibility to passing magistrates. The clip full of rounds now heavy in his pocket and discovery by some nosy pedestrian always a concern. The lift, it seems, had been immense, taking him from the field of some ongoing battle comradeship back to safe and comforting surroundings. Though circumstances routinely evidenced the fantastic, life at this point was small and matter of fact in its everyday proportions.
The spirit of conflict was in the air. The pettiness of supposed wrongs took center stage for the proffered excuse of longstanding hurt. Dumb buffalos ranged the darkened landscape with broken bleeding horns bellowing impotently in search of victims upon which to exercise their blind wrath. A certain sense of stillness heralded the coming storm on what was to prove a negatively productive bright sunny day. Small abrasive encounters were spoiling for the dignity of apparently impossible to ignore incidents. These incidents grew from newly inflamed contentions into physical combat, initially by larger groups massing upon solitary vulnerable individuals. Law enforcement was brought into these flashpoints and after a minimal amount of struggle to what appeared to be a general level of mass rebellion, retreated to form lines cordoning off the violence troubled zones in hasty demarcations. The population within abandoned to the vagaries of old scores to settle and the advance of easy opportunities. Easy justification by virtue of justice substituted from lawful to legal sent crowds spilling through the sally ports of larger businesses, the goods emptied within a span of minutes.
Batteries of lights flickered on at remote locations as insurance actuaries text’ed in requesting the latest tally of stores currently breached. Surveillance cameras relayed the chaos within each location until in many cases one by one their dedicated intranet feeds went black. Perhaps someone higher up had calculated the cost of what had become another cynical exercise in some tried and true Machiavellian technique at political nullification of the unwashed masses? One could easily sense both fear and mistrust as the foundation of public awareness. Whatever the outcome of this incident, it was surely to retard the cooperation of black, white, yellow and brown for decades to come. But then, that was what was intended all along. The bullheaded could be counted upon to upset the applecart. All the years of beauty and goodwill that wafted through the air like perfume from a flower, extinct, as if it had never been. What was it that made the offspring so suggestible to the trend of publicized thought? The circulated paper mentioned, “In God We Trust!” but what God of the month club did they belong to? The gods that one knew were long dead. Killed by the almighty buck and the willingness to do anything to collect its paper. The convenience of a fantasy world dial-able at any given instant was just too attractive. An overwhelming blanket of blue bottle flies had mysteriously descended down upon the land without much notice as to what ill wind or similar phenomena had introduced them. A sign of evil, evidentiary of eons of decay, come finally to fruition. The plagues of Egypt brought to you by those original creators of the larger more expansive myth.
People like a good story. And authors everywhere in every time previous up to the present are tasked to wrack their brain to come up with good ones. Tales that trump the previous ones told, both in and out of memory. To speak in a manner that captures interest it seems one is best to express both love and disgust almost simultaneously. Ever does the pen attempt to right some infinitively unjust wrong with splashes of ink applied here or there to suit the genre and taste that the reader finds most novel. Yet in life, in the assembling of such tales one is challenged by fleeting moments ever on the cusp of recognition for lack of the true import of what their permutations with deliver.
An instant that, like falling from on high from an unsuspected edge, once can only appreciate at best within whistling air. The impact, always fatal to the conclusions come of one’s accompanying thoughts. Like good wine, some small measure of same, appropriately fit for later recollection. The larger story that one had original purpose to retell, only able to be approximately hinted at. This is the place where the reader’s imagination takes rightful command and fills in the needed empathetic blanks. So then, writers are like sailors locked upon land, bereft of the ability to convey the actuality of their mother sea. Poor tradesman by the standards of normal material offerings, they are abandoned from the conventional dealings of other men in tangible offspring of experiences available through coin.
Thus the blank page is a vast ocean that separates the author from those that would seek to call themselves his appreciators. However wide this breach, occasionally the prose turns to verse and stills the soul of all who love the language that the illusions were put forth. This is the grace and holy chalice that all writers seek in their heart of hearts. A tenuous existence at best with absolutely perfect strangers.
One of the problems with getting past your sixth decade is that, like it or not, the world as you know it is no longer in force. The children and the children of their children have actively repainted the canvas. This may go as far as the fabric and culture of neighborhoods that were once intimately familiar being now foreign and inhospitable. Considering that the apex of society is actively refashioning the latest exponent of the workplace into a global penitentiary replete with 24/7 surveillance and rapid response operatives both robotic and not, it is easy to wonder if one has a place within this regimented form of serfdom. After all, what does one have to offer the world in their later years but the knowledge of their life’s experience? And by the physical constitution of these times anything interruptive to the Globalist experience is considered both out of touch and subversive. Especially days like July 4th which celebrate the individual prerogative to choose to oppose the tyranny of former Global thinking empires run by the ancestors of the present pretenders to the throne of absolute power. So, the stamina to withstand the unprecedented shelling by the greatest navy of that time and today subsides into merely a schedule of local municipal fireworks displays almost grudgingly included with the latest ethnic violence in the poorer quarters of a journalistically disadvantaged metropolitan area.
The dirty little secret is that the same mercantile driven forces that occasioned the need for a protracted guerilla war in the northern hemisphere of the new world two hundred years previous have come back in recent decades with a vengeance to strip the wealth from every corner of the land down to the bare roots. Their organs of power have subsumed our governing institutions by colleges of paid functionaries who pretend the guise of public service for the benefit of the common citizen but then line their pockets as they carrying out destructive corporate agendas that benefit only the ‘too big to fail’. Their minions flood the nation with undesirable’s who only seek to self-servedly eat away at the cultural foundations so that power can be centralized to govern a world re-formated into a multiplicity of Bantustans. And all the time the collective ‘we’ are told to remain non-violent and cowed in the face of ever increasingly arbitrary punitive measures of governing that strip the dignity from individuals. Independence day is not the cardboard cutout of the onscreen musings of some outrageous bending by a big budget Hollywood extravaganza expressing an ultimate intent to form a one world global government. It is a reminder that there is a limit to everything that must be observed and ultimately upheld lest we as a culture all believe in nothing but greed and avarice to the living of earthly existence.