a ball of yarn

I don't want money so that I can buy things, or so that I travel, or eat at nice restaurants, or get drinks, or do any of those other things that come with wealth. The only reason I would want money is if I have kids. I don't want them to feel like they're worse than anyone else. I don't want them to feel poor.

Our parents were too busy working. They were the fuel of our nation's prosperity, and in their rush, they lost sight of themselves. They forgot their parents' lessons and they ruined their lives. And this is what their children learned from. We learned from people who were masters of their profession but fools in life, and now we are all messed up. Look at us. We move from city to city, never feeling at home. We break eachother's hearts, searching for a celluloid love. We quit job after job, despairing and decrying: we deserve better than this.

Everything inside of me is tangled up. It's what my parents handed me. It tangled over the course of their lives, and I've added quiet a few knots of my own. The life I lead is worse than their life. It's not hopeless, though. I've turned to picking at the knots. Slowly, I'm unraveling the mess that was given to me. The same is true for some of my peers. We turn inwards. We see what we are and we try to make it better. Perhaps one day we will be wiser than our parents, even if that is our only accomplishment. At least if we have children, we'll be able to hand them fewer knots, fewer kinks, fewer tangles. Perhaps they will be able to do what we could not. Perhaps they will be able to work. They will make the gears of America resume their grinding.

They will work so hard that they let their lives become a tangled mess.

And the cycle will continue.

I'm biking home from Lauren's on a foggy December night. Although it's unseasonably warm, I'm still wearing three layers of cotton and a pair of thin gloves to keep a constant barrier between myself and what little cold is out there. Unfortunately, my jacket and gloves are jet black, as is my hair. From behind, I may be completely invisible to cars, especially since somebody stole my bike lights. That actually happened a couple of months ago, and I keep intending to buy new ones. For the time being, whenever I bike at night I'm constantly worrying about getting hit. It's particularly bad right now with the fog, which is not only collecting on my glasses but obscuring me from nearby drivers.

By the time I'm at the bottom of S. 1st, just a few blocks from home, I've moved onto the sidewalk and started thinking about other things. Broken hearts and bitterness, mostly, which isn't a common subject matter, but one that certainly comes up every now and then. I'd started singing a song that I'd written with an old crush, and it reminded me of her and my own disappointment. Nearby, the cars are whizzing across wet streets, and ahead a hear one run over a heavy branch.

Standing on my pedals, I make my way up the hill as quickly as possible. A car trying to get out of its apartment parking lot has pulled into the sidewalk, and I make eye contact with its driver before weaving around in front. Wheezing from the exertion of an uphill climb, I'm surprised to see a raccoon standing by the curb. Normally they run away, but this one is entranced by the shiny shards of a broken break light. I see them reflecting as a car drives past, and suddenly I decided to stop and get the raccoon out of the road. South 1st is a dangerous road. At the top of the hill a white bike has been strapped to a lamppost, memorializing the death of a cyclist. Many people have been hit here. A raccoon, especially one dumbfounded by shiny plastic, wouldn't fare much better.

Swinging down my kickstand, I get off my bike and start looking for something to poke the raccoon with. My hand is no good for that purpose, because it doesn't like bites and I don't like rabies. Luckily, there's a stick--satisfactorily long--lying near my bike, and I pick it up. Four more cars roll past, and I glower at each one, sending them the psychic message: If you hit this raccoon, I'll fucking whack you with my stick. Once they're gone, I move into the road and start prodding the raccoon towards the sidewalk. He doesn't move, but remains huddled over the shattered brake light, bobbing slightly with each poke. "What the fuck are you doing!"

And then I notice. Those aren't shards of broken plastic. That's blood. The raccoon is bleeding from his nose, completely dazed. "Oh fuck! Fuck!" I storm back to my bike, hurling the stick on the ground. The raccoon is fucked. Looking back it, my mind quickly plays through my options: healing him, putting him out of his misery, abandoning him. I can't do any of these things, so I pick the stick back up and start prodding him again. Eventually, he turns, slowly, and looks at me, small puddles of blood forming over a new patch of cement. He reminds me of my cat Buster, the way he's looking up at me. It's a look of trust and confusion. This is a fucking wild animal, and he's looking at me like I can somehow help. But all I can do is keep prodding him, pleading with him to go. And eventually, he steps up onto the sidewalk, curls up there. I consider taking him home with me, taking care of him. But that's no good. "I wish I at least had some food for you."

And then with sudden fervor, he stands back up and darts into the brush, reminded that he's a wild animal and I'm a predator more than ten times his size.

My First Day in a Cathedral

Catholisism is a sort of Sunday morning poetry. It's beautiful and evocative, but I have no idea what's going on. The mass lasts a little over an hour, yet there are only ten minutes of sermon. The remainder is filled with song and ritual, organs and choirs and incense burning. We stand and bow our heads, we lift our hands at the elbow, we kneel, we turn to eachother and say 'Peace be with you,' we shuffle through an elaborate circle to eat the body of Christ and to drink his blood.

What does all this mean? I am not Catholic and I was not raised Catholic. Yet even to somebody who has no idea what's going on, the beauty of this ceremony can be overwhelming. The chime of the bells, the high notes hit by the choir, the incense smoke rising across a stained glass depiction of Mary in heaven. They evoke the divine, the celestial. In a Godless universe, what is this feeling?

Even if we dismiss religion as mumbo-jumbo (as many of us were raised to do), it's worth noting that hundreds of millions of people practice Catholicism today and find some sort of meaning in it. Amongst the congregation, I saw only a handful of people with blond hair. Almost everyone had dark features, if pale skin. Compare that to the Aryan features of a protestant church. Why the divide? Is this something passed on from parent to child? From generation to generation for hundreds of years?

And the relationship between the Catholics and the Jews. Reading from a book written in the late 1800s, Jews are depicted as outsiders, often seedy. Just a hundred years ago, could I have walked so easily into a Cathedral? With all its grandeur, its expensive materials and its overwhelming size, this was the creation of the populous, of the majority, of the masses. These were the people that sweat and toiled, that transformed an inhospitable wilderness into a place where people could thrive. This was the great bulk of humanity, their labor divided, organized and hierarchical. A handful directed the many and guided them to create these great monuments to civilization. Because the masses were aligned with the will of their rulers, they were welcome into these places. Jews, however, were on the outside. They had a separate, smaller society with its own, less rigid hierarchy. They did not acknowledge the superiority of the Genteel elites, and so were kept on the fringes. Later, as Western civilization transitioned to capitalism, this outlook gave them the boldness to become leaders within the economy, while Catholics were encouraged to continue submitting out of love for Christ, love for their neighbors, love for order and society.

Even to this day, the Catholic church holds sway over countless people. Even if eternal life is a myth, something essential is passed on from father to son, mother to daughter. Eternity is found in the unbroken chain of heredity. And to those good Catholics who practice the love of Christ, who work hard and accept the authority of society, they are promised advancement through the ranks of heaven. From generation to generation, they will rise through society as long as their spirit doesn't falter and they wander not down the darkened paths.

Demons, Angels, and the Human Psyche

As a culture, we take a unique pleasure in insulting the intelligence of our ancestors. Stories of blood-letting and witch-burning are woven into our conceptions of the past. When we say 'Dark Ages,' it's with an undertone that those centuries were truly brutal, degraded, and filled with the most vile forms of ignorance. Neighboring countries slaughtered each other, raped and pillaged. People accused one other of heresies and murdered criminals for the slightest infraction. It's easy to conjure the image of a man swaying from the gallows, or of a smoldering ruin that was once a thriving village. These images glow with a celluloid menace, and sitting in the movie theatres, it's easy to think, 'I'm glad it's not like that anymore.' How proud we are that we're better than the medieval peasantry, whose ignorance serves to highlight the sophistication of our own culture.

Yet rather than dismissing their belief as ignorant, what happens when we explore them seriously? Let's take, for instance, the phrase 'bless you,' which originates from the bygone belief that when a man is sneezing, he's expelling demons from his body. Taken at face value, many of us find this laughable. But at the same time, our ancestors were on to something. Like modern doctors, they noticed that when an individual started sneezing, his behavior likewise changed. He had greater trouble rising from bed, he was lethargic, he complained of aches. They blamed these symptoms on 'demons' and said that the man was trying to expel them when he sneezed. This explanation isn't that far from the truth. We simply replace the word 'demon' with that of 'virus,' and suddenly it fits seamlessly with modern medical science. Our ancestors understanding of sickness was more colorful than our own, but it was likewise based on observation and reasoning.

This gets even more interesting when we examine their beliefs on temptation. While modern psychology blurs the interplay of psychic forces to create a single 'self' or 'I', medieval psychology recognized the multitude of impulses and thought patterns that composed the individual. Some of these psychic qualities they classified as demons, asserting that many of our thoughts and impulses were just the whisperings of these infernal beasts. Others they ascribed to the Holy Ghost, who spoke on God's behalf within the individual's psyche. This same dichotomy would later be depicted in cartoons from the beginning of the 20th century, with a child protagonist conflicted between a selfish or pro-social choose, a demon standing on one shoulder and an angel on the other.

Because they differentiated between their thoughts in this manner, it's easy to conceive that even in their ignorance, many of our ancestors were more aware of themselves than we ourselves are. The modern layman simply doesn't have as many symbols to attach to his own mental processes. Meanwhile, within the cosmology of demons and angels, there is a great wealth of encoded psychological wisdom, and we are fools for so casually dismissing it.

responsibility

do not forget: even if you are not a father (and will never be a father), you have the responsibility to bring something into this world. you know what it is. now stick with it.

The Garden of Eden was man's time in the wild, living off the land. Original sin was plowing the fields, building hovels, and settling down. The fruit of that tree was growing in a man-made orchard. It was the first fruit an agrarian society ever tasted.

When we die, we do not persist on some other plane. The only remnants of our soul is in our children, which is passed on from generation to generation. In this way, we have the potential to be immortal. And heaven is simple the Earth, if we can guide it to a heavenly state. And hell is also just the Earth, if we lead lives that degrade it and make it a hellish place to live.