While driving around downtown yesterday, I almost ran over a street rat. The little guy hopped off the curb, and ran across a busy four lane road. I stopped to let it pass. Yes, I’m serious. I stopped so that a street rat may live downtown. I was surprised, though, that when I stopped to let him go across, other people were trying their hardest to run him over. He had to dart under the wheels of a couple of cars that had swerved in an effort to catch him under their wheels. He made it to the other side, and waddled down an alley out of sight. I couldn’t help but smile and keep on driving. But that got me to thinking: Why did everyone try and kill him? Doesn’t that say a lot for how we value life? If it had been a cat, people would have been stopping and/or swerving all over the road in an effort to avoid killing it. But why not stop for a rat? As far as intelligence goes, rats are comparable to a cat. Take it a step further, and we can see that they’re both furry, can be kept as pets,

Continue readingAnd he sees again, just what the world is made of. He keeps firing, repeating “God is love”…

I spent today reading through some old journal entries that I’ve archived over the last fifteen years. It was all so depressing. I was amazed at how often I spoke about wishing to die, and wanting to disappear. I can’t imagine having that mentality now, but I was apparently very ready to be done with my life when I was 22. Here’s an excerpt I ran across this afternoon, from December 14th, 2004: It’s impressive to me how angry people in my life can make me. How difficult it is to ignore those impulses to simply tell everyone in my life to go fuck themselves, so I can just stop worrying if the next thing that comes out of their mouth is going to be something to hurt me. What a horrible feeling to always be terrified that someone is going to break your heart. You can allow people just close enough to get a taste of it, but you shove them away as if they were poison the moment you really start to feel threatened. You shut down. Close off, and don’t talk. I did that today, and didn’t even realize it until I hung up the phone. I

Continue readingAnd we don’t even care to shed these zipper blues. And we don’t know, just where our bones will rest to dust.

Mother’s day is a little less than a week away now. I complain about it every year because, well, I don’t have a mom. She was taken from me. It makes me sad every time I think about it, even though it will have been ten years this June. I don’t think it’ll ever get easier; I think it’ll only continue to be more and more bearable. And that’s okay. Loss is supposed to be difficult, and losing someone as important as your mother is an important event. It’s not something that one should be able to just shrug off. I was 17 when she died of colon cancer. I was resentful of God or fate or life for taking her from me. I knew I was being cheated out of knowing my mom as a friend, and not just a parent. We’d just bridged that gap a year or two prior to her dying, and I would have liked to have found a little bit more of who I was, within her. More importantly, though, I wanted closure on a few things. But before we discuss that, let’s start from the beginning, shall we? My mom was born on

Continue readingNight after night the same decisions; go drive, give in, it’s all the same to me now.

Reality is an unstoppable force which gnaws away every molecule of muscle attached to our bones. It consumes everything in its path. Only those who can perceive a reality greater than what they live will suffer; most people, apathetic, realize contentment in underachieving, never comprehending the extent of their capabilities and never knowing they’re being slowly eaten. Eventually, nothing is left and we all die. For some, the torture of unrealized greatness exceeds their capacity to live; Picasso and Poe come to mind. They were defective by choice. They chose not to see the obvious wider understanding that reality, although inexorable, is manageable. Limits are subjective. I can’t tell you shit from the keyboard; no statement will provide comfort from across this distance and the voids that we all tread. This is a lesson that cannot be learned but from experience. My experience, although the polar opposite from yours, the reader, in quantitative values, is similar in the underlying circumstances. Some of us just don’t fit. Having chosen (consciously or no) to conform or not, we, by choosing not to decide, decide a path of self-justification. I tell you, the real choice is the act of empowering us to prosecute

Continue readingThere’s a woman in the balcony weeping, licking her lips at the fall