Chapter Twenty – Our Collective

Back to Ch 19 part 2

Chapter Twenty – Our Collective

584

In April a tornado tore through Tuscaloosa a mile wide.  The homeless twisted claw-tossed citizens.  After a week the Alabama faithful wanted a reprieve, a sanctuary of simple security, a moment to think, to privately shower, to collect hair-drained thoughts.  (What would Frankl say?)  People were penniless to possess a sanctum to set down the donated clothes and supplies. 

There was a no-rain drought in Nottoway flaring west to Texas.  Driving around our neighborhood Penelope could not understand the politics of American lawn care.  Penelope scanned the sprinklers and lawnmowers scurrying.  Penelope asked me, “Dad these people are crazy.  Water the grass.  Cut the grass.  Water, cut, water, cut.  Innie-Meenie-Miny-Moe.  If they didn’t water so much they wouldn’t have to cut it.”  Penelope saw the hamster wheel.

Maybe her age could not catch up to all of it, but I was learning to never underestimate her; I told Penelope, “Humans care too much about appearances.  Americans cling to our little-bitty squares of Earth.  We want our grass shiny green.  We water and cut within the lines like a coloring book, to worry about things that aren’t even really problems.  We can not always be so concerned with what everybody thinks.  It hasn’t rained in months so everybody is watering.  Sometimes you have to hose out the sprinkler to stave off death for the roots, but there has to be a balance.  Daddy cuts the grass every once in a while, but sometimes you have to just let it grow and play panda’s in the backyard.  Want to go play?”

585

Wednesday after dropping Penelope off at school to return for a week with her mother, I thought of Penelope’s baptism.  Her submerged pulp skull was sanctified in Catholic Dasani and a crucifix thumbprint of Chanel No.5 Chrism oil.  That cranial follicle flood represented a staved damnation.   In retrospect I see an act of fear of the ramifications of pathological disobedience. 

What parent wants to hell-bound their kid on that razor’s edge of Pascal’s wager?  Visions of poison-sugar-plumb thrashing limbs toiling in an inferno explode like popcorn for an inevitable movie if not for the unction of sacred water.  For most boys that blade starts by hacking the halo off his penis. 

I remember the booklet promises her mother and I read, Hilton’s tie, and Penelope’s cherub face.  How could a parent not be serious for ignorant dependents?  Hoops, mats, lawns, hats, white gowns, drinks, baths seemed like silly crutches and all the more dangerous now.  How does a parent explain God to a child without a narrative and a book?

586

Everyday was a first world problem death.  During my workday morning piss, I would flip NPR on to check if the world had destroyed itself over night.  No terrorist or government apocalypse yet to tip the candle flame to the drapes; I did not want to miss out.  Let the dominoes fall.  Nations acted like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs pointing handguns in a circle barking fear.  Mr. Blonde, Blue, Pink, Orange, Brown, White: Israel was going to nuke Iran first and then the gang bang would commence, USA decay.

Alone was my heroin.  I fermented like Korean Kimchi hopping for beneficial rot.  I missed having someone to talk to.  I thought about Elyse.  I did not want to place her face back into that bargain Wal-Mart bin of estranged people.  I missed our phone calls.  I prayed the world of silence was my own Lent.  Solitary was my opiate.  Most prisoners adapt to prison given time.

I could no longer verbalize.  Every time I spoke to a mirrored surface I stuffed the words back in my mouth like escaping mice from a laboratory.  I saw tails and feet, scampering with serums and potential vaccines coursing through veins.  I knew there was no way to sort escapees back into cages without crushing their bones.  If I felt the startling tingling sensation of their appendages upon my skin I would just twist necks or snap spines before I could grip and stroke their fur to try to go back to a path of empirical conclusions.

587

I wrote and tried to pay more attention to our world.  If I was going to be in isolation I was going to think and find a way to do.  Elections around the world startled me.  Neda died in Iran for simple dreams.  Syria, Libya, Tunisia; what the fuck were we doing in America bickering over fake problems, creating wars like Betty Crocker fear-icing recipes, filibustering constipation? 

I started to blog again, this time about democracy; WeVote.gov for a web-based proxy voting portal for all U.S. citizens to each of our elected officials, term-limits, capped campaign-spending based on a census of local voters and mandated linkage to at least one candidate in the race.  It was all just shit, but whatever happened was our responsibility.

People blame these acronyms and R’s and D’s, but it is really us.  Change comes in groundswells, like tornados or floods ivory towers can no longer ignore.  The trick is not destroying the whole countryside in the aftermath.  The revolutionaries have to live post-deluge.  I was a pragmatic punk.  Money, compassion, work-ethic, interdependence; it is all linked.  Blame is a detour.  Humanity is the only road.

I was so frustrated with: career politicians fighting over the debt ceiling in an intransigent tug of war, bailouts for mega banks, funding wars for false senses of security, watching men commit crimes to go to prison to acquire healthcare, credit card debt and gasoline prices dominating our pocket books, and uncontrollable kids holding second grade elementary school classrooms hostage.  The world gawked, “What can I possibly do?”  I was just another drone ant addicted to the pheromones with a twelve-step lack of wisdom to know differences.  What I can change, what I can’t, pfff, fuck if any of us know? 

The only plan that made sense was that there was always the choice of how to do and with action, the choice to immediately and fully do what needs to be done, without procrastination.  End the banter, no white flags, do.  Our ultimate battle is with ourselves, not to waver or debate, but to choose to wake each morn, to retort the alarm clock in a concerted shifting of limbs from floor corner, dirt, or mattress. 

This conflict is unavoidable to brave beings, to rebuke the clamp of numb nothingness with steeper breaths.  Combat slumber with revved tempo and decisive confrontation.  One must stare down the mirror, shave or powder a foundation, corral stray follicle protrusions and pave the secluded cancers of modern commercial science cackling aluminum into our armpits to veil the stench of our bodies. 

588

I went to Tim’s band’s show on a Saturday at the “Community Records Block Party” punk festival in New Orleans.  I donated clothing to the New Orleans Mission as part of the fundraiser they were doing.  I had a purple natural Beaucoup fruit-juice snowball.  Tim played a song about me telling him how Penelope informed me that her mother had told her, “Daddy only pretends to love you.”  Rocking out was empowering.  I think the rest of the crowd felt kind of weird about his telephone-game preamble introduction to the song of my fake-problems.  I guess the humanity was that twinge too personal. 

I bought some Jamaican veggies from a vendor named Phillip.  I talked to Phillip about Africa in my K’naan fedora.  We talked about, “Wave Your Flag” as the song of the South African World Cup and the pains of Somalia and Jamaica.  The plantains were a pauper’s decadence.  The greens were nourishing. 

A few of the bands did tributes to this guy Frank, who was in a band called the “Frozen Zombies.”  Frank said, “Fuck off all nerds,” at shows while dancing in the merge of humanity near the stage daring the “what would people think” wallflowers to get the fuck up and live.  Glasses, acne, rumpled hair, tax bracket, fuck it; everyday was a page in a notebook with an unknown, but finite number of sheets.  Frank was murdered in a home invasion in Manchester, New Hampshire, gun shot to the chest band mates pleading and spared next to him on the couch.  Frank was love, silenced for no Godly reason.

I had met Frank once at a house party for one of Tim’s friends Chad in Mid City New Orleans.  Tim, Frank, Chad and I were out on the porch steps having an existential discussion after Frank and Tim were declared beer pong champions.  Chad talked about fearing death, how it was healthy.  I remember feeling older; mature, like I knew a damn thing.  Fuck. My thoughts on God, life, whatever had apparently kept growing, kept wandering.  Frank echoed what my drunken tongue tried to utter to Chad.

I went on a blabbering rant.  “I do not fear.  I respect death, but it is not what we do that matters, only how. The rationale is innate, not to our bias, but to peace of the interconnected all.  We each belong, you, Frank my brother, me, every planet, every being. 

We are capable of contemplating that all of existence was created outside of existence, not from nothingness, but from God existing outside of our physical senses, not for us to do, but to accomplish actions incapable to an infinite deity, to participate in the act of choice, to chose the how we will either support our related nature, for we are not separate; we are not nothingness; we are everything.

You, my brother me, every planet, every being, we are part of God.  We are split acting in the every constant present.  There are memories.  There are expectations, but they only exist in the all encompassing now.  So in this we celebrate and morn entwined in recognition that if we perish in our flawed irrelevant bodies this instant, we revert not to judgment for what we have done to others, but to that which we have done to ourselves.

There is no expansion or contraction, only the depth of a sorrow or peace resounding in the one consciousness beyond time, beyond arms or hearts or faces, but in the ethos of singularity that is nil of physical space.  It makes a quark a universe to itself, strung together with the thread that belays the quandary that we each know what is we are meant to do, yet will never have a clear explanation as to why, or an order to compel the energies resulting in such a choice to be construed as a mandate rather than an option.  Religion attempts to superimpose a mandate, cut the linked mystery and hijack free-will.

For if that string were broken and this mystery were to become legal appeasement we would have fallen not for the devils of religion, but into the belly of reverting to that which we have now assured ourselves to be.  

Through the obliteration of our unverified ignorance, we return to being a component of the all, of God, laughing at ourselves from truncating the grand experiment rationalizing life, in place of the infinitely dense, infinitely empty nothingness encapsulated in an eternal precipice of a contemplation inside what we could be, if we were not fully in dominion of our own willed determination resting in the crevice of asking the question.

Why do?  Why do anything at all?  We as the everything gave ourselves the gift of not knowing, of pretending to ourselves.  What if we could dream the beauties, the horrors, and the honesty of universes in a theatre of cascading fantastical consequences parading in the confluences of free wills and the forces of science?  The rhythm of an orchestra conductor’s baton correlates a mathematic algebraic balancing assurance as a gut check and a hint of that which we have intentionally hidden from our segmented partitions.

In order to carry out this iteration we hold an experiment in which if we knew every step, our particles would vibrate out of existence.  We have provided the illusions.  The very definition for God to exist at all is the ultimate infinite paradox.  It is looping inside itself in no space, but in the inception of an inception. 

It is perpetually tangent to the act of choosing, knowing God can never choose, because choice demands the platform of time as a paradigm of transaction.  Time is required for there to a be a before, a moment of now to decide and an after for a consequence.  God has not that luxury.  To grant the illusion of such, we exist.  To provide the platform to dabble with the finger paint of free will, time exists as art itself, merely to depict both beauty and horror as external expressions of the internal.  Time is the canvas of mutuality.

In supposed ignorance of what we truly are, or why, or how we do what we do, we choose.  We are so haughty, reckless, and bitter over the vast wealth we possess.  We are occasionally pious and judgmental, yet eternally we come back to the how.  How we do what we do is the only thing that matters.

It is the why, in and of itself, innate, answering our own question in the form of a harmonic resonance or dissonance we send as a chord in a trans-universal echo booming not of any distance, but into our being.

This resonance is constantly present in the bowels of our choice, and in this there can be no fear.

There is only now, for time is but an illusion we taught ourselves.  Time is a tool, a necessary paradigm alien to God used to conduct the transaction of the illusion and garner the crop of the why and the how. 

Death is the truncation of nothing; at most it is changing clothes.  Death is unveiling the curtain togas of our ignorance for some.  As for my brother, Frank, you, and me, we should be nakedly here in this now.

Do not fear, revel and respect this great present.  This peace of the bounty of these breaths, do it now. Inhale. Exhale.  Read. View.  Dive into the words of Kierkegaard, Einstein, Nietzsche, Goethe, and Spinoza.  Hear Mozart exert the tones of Don Giovanni to our infinitesimal planet.

In the giddy laughter of eons, know the glory of sorrow, the ecstasy of the aesthetic, and the peace of the ethical.  Feel the conjoining and the absence encompassing every moment and the chains of fear dissipate into dust.

Shake not the nudity of this unshackled responsibility, but embrace the comedy of the self, laugh, love, peace, revel in harmony or cower in dissonance now that you have unmasked the armies of fear.  See fear in this world, behind its marketing empire.

Strip its barbs in the drums of war from your ears, from the piety of thrones to arbitrate hunger or poverty from your stomach, from the gall to claim sovereignty in ones accomplishments from your mouth with the audacity to use language to construct a statement.

For what is our first word, but our grand initial proclamation of our reliance on others?  See fear for its true self, dodging the easy trap of anger towards those who drink fear’s chalice, for sympathy towards their ignorance is required.  Love.  Teach.  Enlighten.

See the grand entanglement.  See the irrelevance of nuclear war and the horror of the spiritual terror that would lead to such oblivion.  Fear is not an enemy, but an illusion to lift.  Just as we have hypnotized ourselves into the gift our humanity, as a higher functioning being capable of recognizing that something outside of existence must have created existence, we have traded ignorances.  We are like an envelope inside an envelope. 

The looping logic of why we exist at all is a trick we played on ourselves into not knowing so that life can exist upon the soil of time.  In that life, we strive every day to un-trick ourselves from this action so that we may share this bounty with the rest of our partition beguiled in fear.  Rejoice.  The choice is ours.”

I said all that stuff or at least in my besotted memories I think that is what my soliloquy contained.  Who knows?  I just remembered when I was saying it I felt like something was flowing through me trying to teach myself something at the same time my body was forming words and inebriated diction. 

But on the day of Block Party, that day had passed, Frank was gone, but I think he knew.  He lived that way, without fear.  People were struck by his fearlessness.  They were in awe and a community responded. 

I hung out by myself most of the day.  I even volunteered to sweep and sort garbage and recyclables and lug equipment to clean afterwards.  Penelope was with her mother.  Maybe I had no better place or maybe I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

589

Community Records put out a benefit for the one year anniversary of the B.P. oil spill to raise money for the Gulf Coast Group.  I got together with Tim.  I wrote and did spoken word on a poem while Tim played bass guitar for a track on the compilation.  The rest was punk and ska bands. 

Blowout on the Macondo

Mississippi Canyon Block 252, BP, Andarko, Mitusui, me and you

50 million barrels producible reserves, April twentieth and there goes the bell curve

Time bomb set off in the bartered assumption that, the progression of a bank account towards an infinite limit cracked, Quantum equation of earnings per share could some how trump these negative environmental externalities floating in the air

Like a plague wind of what-ifs wafting towards the shore line, In the belly of a billion oil-slicked armored mosquitoes making a plume out a pipeline, Set to impinge their drill-bit straws to inject the toxic milkshake of Cenozoic and Jurassic compressed bedfellows with virulent maws

Heated up in a mixture of square-celled ferns and amber prisons, Into crude fuel churning a mile-down hive you’d swear was still living, Bobby Pin pierced the nest, These sludge bugs are billowing out like lost smoke monsters headed for shore in route

To inject and infect every micro-organism in subtle transient replication of that, Which is biologically segregated into chasms of habitat.  Prison-celled Earth, Desegregated by man in an apocalyptic birth, All these oxygen-enriched bodies cling to their organic natural plans, Irony of those deceased-Paleozoic remnants obeying the pharaoh’s hand

Creeping death, Comes in the angel’s overcoat to delta land, Louisiana’s deep-well blood coming back to dinner in a vampire’s invitation into our homes, Mix their virus into our veins in an exchange for the liquid.  Suck it up, Family boats spray benzene dispersants to estrange.

Feelings of a subculture of Boudreaux sons dying.  One-hundred years of solitude later Native American social suicide crying, In the arms of Earth’s genocide, That the shrimp have now joined the buffalo to be farm-raised in designated areas as a novelty dish, Prince William’s Sound knows

From plankton into fish eggs maturing into mutated consumptions.  From herons and pelicans nesting and regurgitating these carcinogenic capsule productions.  Into the open mouths of their young.  We are feasting on the buffet of being and participating in the practice of being ignored, and Praying for mercy by pleading.

Corporate and governmental responsibilities participating in the duality

Mutual assurance inside an industry to facilitate self-monitoring causalities

To avoid catastrophes told by Mike Williams facing death in the singed eye sockets

Fire-doors failed and leaping ten stories down into a bath of mucked profits

Praying his body is not lit a fire at any moment, his children can not attend an incinerated father’s funeral to mourn him, Because all the lifeboats have evacuated in crazed haste, Chaos is churning out in the Gulf’s waves, Hell is riding the winds of these midnights counting down, In the silence of nature Man and earth at war is the only sound

Business Ethics 101 like a punch line for every professor from Tulane to Oxford

Of what rubberized particles in the mud coming up means in the short versus long runs for profits,

The drill shaft was not centered, Is not that always man’s problem?

Trying to ram in too fast without proper lubrication or solvents

Damn near at the ready, Prior planning for foreseeable externalities aren’t worth the pennies or pounds, To the stockholders earnings per share and weather forecasts just got much worse, Rubber gaskets to tear and blowout preventers, annular chunks now missing, The pod has lost function, and this could never happen just exploded in the production of an assumption

A million dollars a day or a billion eggs not laid, trade-offs and send-offs

August fourth static kill, oil is capped and who pays the bills?

Valdez clean-up workers still got neurological buzz kills

1989, 2010 stand up and take a look around again, Take warning, Freeze up coming

Black swan event, Nah, Feathers are white just drenched in the sludge of man’s oversight

Eddie Vedder at Jazz Fest sending management’s kids on a beach vacation with Palmolive mops, Transocean suicide in the night and the jury is still out, Boudreaux has gone Blanco, right out,

Katrina has a sequel in the bowels of Plaquemines, eyes are burning and a culture thought all they needed was Federal flood insurance and an Army Core levee, Don’t sell me

Are we still not Americans?

590

Humanity felt like a clichéd clan of gang-bang rapists in denial of our conformity.  We are a belligerent metaphor; a kid playing with matches until the web of our world overheats after we have incinerated the forests.  Parents do not even notice the damage nor can identity the arsonist.  We collectively rape the Earth with six-trillion toothpick dicks every rotation to hide our guilt from our sun.  We sodomize her in an assembly line of she-male cocks and he-girl dildos like knives all at once with rainbow-colored pubes in CAFO lots.  We bore into that ocean-cunt.  We knead her like dough, repressing her yeast to rise stripping the gluten of the time needed to form nourishing bread.  Instead we breed a blob of rancid bacteria to consume like an annulled marriage for our own suicide.

Nobody gives a fuck to stop after she’s passed out.  We want her to keep coming oil, trees, water, plants, fish, soil, cattle-flatulence, icebergs, and orgasms of oxygen in fossil-fueled moisture from a barren menopausal vagina.  And when she complains about the STDs and hot-flashes, we call that bitch a liar and wait for our dicks to get hard to do it again un-lubricated. 

Kyoto, UNFCCC, green-house summits, CFC commissions, emissions standards, pesticide and carbon-externalities: Eh let’s go get drunk and fuck by the American Standard toilet, I’m sweating!  India and China are gonna have to piss in the woods out back.  What the fuck does anthropogenic even mean? 

Eh, maybe we try not to go in ram-rod raw-dog.  Maybe we tell her we love her tomorrow.  Maybe we redefine subcategories of rape based on legitimacies.  Maybe we wear bee-hive suit looking rain-coats and clean up to separate the fluids.  Inevitable is a hard word to combat.

591

A lot of people downloaded and donated.  I hoped the words made people think, but what did I know.  I figured when we micro-waved the Earth, humans would go extinct and the Earth would just keep on revolving.  Acting like the Earth could be mad at us was sort of myopic, like God getting mad at us.  Anger, oil spills, greed, steroid-cows; it is all just one of the 31 flavors of suicide.  Humanity is optional.

People did all these rain-dances to stop the drilling, but even after the Macondo, to me it was about the smart grid, investing in renewable energy to create thresholds of adoption.  You can not manifest change by telling people cocaine is bad for them.  All you can do is invent a drug that doesn’t destroy their body and their lives to get them to where they need to be.  People need their drugs.  We just never utter the d word.  Paradigm shifts will come in leaps of technology, thought.  It is not tree huggers versus bloated bankers.  It is honest planning, timelines, and mutual industry and societal assurances to internalize the epidemic illnesses our reality creates.

592

After Ashley had her son Gilligan, Penelope was a hive of nerves.  Penelope clung to her mother whimpering in my doorway to return to my custody on a Tuesday her school was closed.  Her brother four days old swung in a carrier in Ben’s grip.  Ashley said, “We have to change this.  It’s getting worse.”  I thought (if we could ever have an actual conversation; years now and never one.)  Ben chimed, “We can take her anytime.”  I said, “That’s only a salve.” 

My mind condemned my own words in contrast between Penelope’s mother and father, one perspective implying the cessation of my presence, the other the equitable extension to swap to an every Friday seven day transition to extinguish this daily undulation of Penelope’s perpetual lottery-ball tally of M’s and D’s on her calendar.  One understood the psychology of a child sensing attention slipping like water through palm lines.  One saw a child terrified to motion towards an ogre.  I saw a prepubescent lioness declawed encouraged to suckle a tit now occupied by another’s reservation wanting a space to nuzzle.

A half hour later, Penelope entered.  Ashley’s callow triad exited.  I made dinner.  Penelope cried on my shoulder.  At bedtime we talked, rehashing discussed fears of a sibling no longer dormant.  I asked Penelope why she clung.  She said, “I miss mommy.  I am afraid something is going to happen to her.  She can’t walk up the stairs.  They cut mommy’s belly open to get Gilligan out.”  I ensured her of her mother’s safety and explained the common place occurrence of caesarean sections. 

I told her sometimes mommy might think you don’t want to be with daddy, when you cling like that.  She told me, “They think you are the Grinch.  Sometimes they talk and well you know...”  I reminded her of what it means to have a secure love, of living the life she must live.  “Your mother loves you.  Your father loves you.  Believe what is in your heart.  You always have your heart, no matter where you are.  It is ok to not know what to say.  You can always talk to your daddy, even if you just want me to listen and not say anything.”

I began to tell Penelope, “You have to sail your boat with the current.”  I moved my hands up motioning directions to explain what a current was.  Each day you add to your boat.  One day you get a flag, a pirate hat, a fishing pole or a sail, but it’s not a boat.  It is what is in your heart.  It is reading the fifth chapter of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, (which we had just finished.)  It is a sleepover with your friend Annabelle on the sofa bed for the first time.  It is learning how to roller skate.  It is each day putting a memory in your heart that you can only use to move forward.  My eyes began to well.

“You can never go back against the water.”  Penelope asked, “What does that mean daddy?”  “It means no matter how much you may want your mommy and daddy to live in the same house, that will never be again, and we can not live in a past.  We have to appreciate what we have each day and choose to love and grow.”  I gave Penelope a hug.  Tears glistened on my cheeks in the darkened room.  She was calmed and drifted towards reverie.

593

I wrote the final post to my American Manifesto blog.  How do we pay for all this?  How do we fund this country?  I knew money was the bane and fuel of pragmatic idealism. 

We run decapitated-chicken NASCAR rodeos circling ovals of judgment and blame for pyrrhic Indy-500 milk-slurping victories.  In the end we work despite the marketing opportunities.  Somebody else did it first so we do it too.  We toil and perspire to generate this bulk of daily fuel for our collective continuance, yet we squabble for table-scraps in an unprecedented democratic polarization of wealth.  Washington D.C. was like B.C. rotting in Plato’s cave with vitriolic filibusters and campaign contributor fellatio.

My ideas may not be original or complete.  I perspire arrogance and ignorance to attempt such folly.  I am not an economist.  Problems are relative.  I don’t have a PHD, but I am human.  I do care.  We have to start somewhere.  Maybe someone out there could help me steal some splinter of value in this haystack or shed the rest.

I wrote about changing the income tax code from all my time seeing how the CPA world manipulated the rules.  The world was exploitation.  Sometimes simple was better, if we just focused on food, shelter, and health, base needs, not this other shit.  We had to work together on all parts of the tree: roots, trunk and canopy.  People needed a chance, who knows if I made any sense?

If we had web-based IRS-linked flat-aid linked to grocery store SKU codes to buy the equivalent of store brands only for a centralized food program.  What about twenty-percent housing down-payment savings programs for working people and less unending rent assistance?  Link SKU codes to all credit card or corporate checking accounts deductible on corporations and partnerships to keep people from deducting their entire Sam’s Club bill on their return.  Use big-data to improve auditing.  End all deductibility of meals and entertainment expenses for businesses.  It is too fraudulent.  

The Boomers were going to be exiting their bumper cars to exit that daily fowl-racetrack in the next decade.  No matter how many accidents they caused or wrecked vehicles blocked the road behind their finish, Boomers were done.  Generation X better be empowered and prepared to pick up the gap or we all fail.

594

I felt the connection in my writing and in my country.  I may have lived in some little nowhere American town.  My path may be non-eventful, boring and full of mistakes, but I imagine a lot of people feel that way.  Like Bukowski, I saw myself as a flawed flesh bag, drinking the moment, but inside I wanted to be able to relate with something greater.  I pondered the choice, like Kierkegaard’s either / or.  I recognized the ideas of those that came before me and took the task of possibly adding something to the pile, like what I owed (my duty).

I felt duty can only exist in the temple of the individual, for duty requires choice.  Choice requires free will.  Only individuals have free will.  Therefore all duty is to the self embedded inside the choice.  The choice forms culpability to the self for consideration of the universal to which the individual belongs.  So it is in the concentric paradox of this reality existing on the platform of time, which is a constant exchange between the universal and the self. 

Many individuals claim duty to a government, a religion, a law, a genetic relation, a sense of morality born in the external.  Often this ultimate duty is labeled as God, but once we see God in ourselves the act of self-duty ceases to be misconstrued as a narcissistic act or a hedonistic massage of our ego, but one that addresses the very meaning of our existence by recognizing the only manner in which universal responsibility can exist is by acknowledging our membership in a common whole that is what so many refer to as God.  We see ourselves as part of God, rather than betrothed in obligation to an external arbitrator.  Only then does the exclusivity of duty as an internal property become apparent.

When the idea of external duty is deconstructed in its essence there can only be duty to the self; for only a self can choose.  The choice is everything; the individual is the party which benefits and suffers universally through the consequences born onto the individual. 

Forgiveness is our highest duty, for only inside the individual can the genuine nature of forgiveness be determined.  When requested, only the wrong doer knows the intensity of the recognition of the void one has created.  When granting forgiveness, only the forgiver knows the intensity of the selflessness one utilizes to forgive.  These are internal measures that refuel the whole.  The intensity of each component of the duality forging forgiveness stabilizes the system.

When we exchange in war, murder, hatred and the notable great evils we are living on the surface of the bland extremes: darkness and lightness.  When we divest ourselves from merely the obvious and interject ourselves into the arena of non-choice we are infected with personal culpability for our duty to ourselves to foster an environment which perpetuates the antithesis of darkness; we see a duty to ourselves to foster lightness through ourselves to manifest in the universal.  Without this introspection we are partial beings eclipsed by our limitation to move beyond possibility into task. 

Once we see our beings as part of this ocean of deep still waters, the agitation of the waves of craven demands for justice, blood, and excessive personal profit (for external duty) will subside and allow us to see the infinitude of leagues below our body in an ever unfolding expanse of how the choice made within ourselves affects the universal, yet holds court only within ourselves to become active in task.

Imagine a circular plane flat on a surface supporting a triangle like a pyramid.  The circle is the universal.  The triangle is the self.  The aesthetic profits of choice ascend the pyramid towards a more narrow volume.  The balance of aesthetic prosperity must be exponentially limiting to create the gravity defying nature of work to erect such structures.  For without the work of the individual the triangle collapses onto the circle, shattering each the triangle and the circle into nothingness. 

For this system of circle and triangle is simultaneously inside each individual.  It constructs a universal whole.  So imagine a bounty of stick figure bodies holding circular plates inside their figurative bellies, supporting triangular pyramids on top of those circular plates inside their beings.  The stick figures are stacked in infinite abundance inside the greater circle and inside the greater pyramid, allocated by the infinite randomness of historical free will and the chaotic forces of nature. 

The motion of what rises to the peek of each pyramid and wades humbly in the tide of the oceanic circle is choice.  One is constantly monitoring the duty to the circle and pyramid inside one’s being, and also the circle and pyramid one’s being resides inside.  If too many individuals raise their individual desires to the extreme, the top of the pyramid will shatter, if not enough, the circular plate will overflow.  In each extreme the balance is destroyed and existence collapses into nothingness.

This is the paradox of free will.  This paradox is everything.  It is what makes us one, while also an infinitude of replicated individuals beholden to a recycling internal culpability that is interconnected to the all.  We coexist because we are part of what so many would default to as calling God. 

The omnipotent component of God exists outside of physical existence, existing before nothingness.  Just as we existed outside of existence into nothingness severed from our self-granted ability to choose (our free will.)  Once we burdened / granted our free will, we were granted the either /or; to see that we are simultaneously individual and universal in existence and in nonexistence, constant and timeless, yet beholden to time in this stage, in this form.  We reflect the timeliness of our gift of choice that grants us the arena and bounties of life along with the duty that embodies our beings as individuals. 

Kierkegaard intimated that we are in a way our own father.  We have an internal duty to raise ourselves, to have neutered gender intercourse within ourselves, to birth ourselves as child through the course of our life.  Some may never begin this task, and thus they will never break through to an end, to unearth the beginning of defining an internal duty. 

Most parents can comprehend an external duty to the wellbeing of their offspring, exacerbated by the selfish compulsion of genetics.  So in the same vein, with self-actualization we can wield a similar motivating energy to rear the child born inside ourselves to be an adult with a resolute and mature intense sense of inner duty.  In this growth we find the universal and our true selves; in this we find the meaning of all.

I have seen the modern confluence of scientific technologies and economic barter play out in the stock market exchanges.  The dominion of the individual has defaulted into the hive of the corporation evolving self-exoneration by defining largess to one’s self as a necessity for the greater good.  

When we rationalize an external duty of a corporation to maximize profit as the singular external duty, we have gouged the eyes of our inner duty, yet despite our blindness, inner duty is constant.  The balance between the arena of work toiled by the individual to harvest a crop sufficient to ensure his own perpetuating nourishment (including an honest measure of pleasantry in excess of that which is minimally required to ensure the next day’s continuation of labor) and the counterweight of what is only possible due to the platform of the universal on which the individual stands to conduct his business, is the definition of what is owed to the universal.

Thinkers like Ayn Rand at war with altruism have the gall to use language to construct a polemic against such considerations of the universal as detrimental to the universal by arguing that energies diverted to the universal diminish the individual from becoming exemplary and benefiting the whole by a greater measure. 

Without the universal what words would an individual speak, but ones of indistinguishable prattle?  One discovers fire, one discovers a heart valve, another a microchip and so we are infinitely savagely lost without such stepping stones manifested in the connected palms of the deceased offering their life’s work to exist as a root living into infinity to bloom the branch of a common plant.

We are interdependent from inception.  Rand was blinded by the Bolsheviks who raided her father’s wealth.  The Bolsheviks were blinded in the other extreme by taking more than what was owed back to the universal and extinguishing the will of the individual to work.  The extremes of absolute altruism and absolute self-interest are equally malignant.  Absolute altruism floods the oceanic circle.  Absolute self-interest bursts the roof of the pyramid.  Each results to surfeit calamity.

The war between these absolutes births the intransigence of modern American Democrats and Republicans worshiping temples of liberal and conservative.  This lack of assimilation to a comingled norm executes practical ideas on the altar of turning internal duty to an exercise of moral conviction.  The complete duty is ignored for a faith in a costumed parody of what is good in order to combat what is a costumed parody of what is evil.  This pantomime turns democratic elections into a baleful farce.

These prancing marionettes battle on our televisions, on our radio waves, and from bully pulpits all the while strung to hands of the same monster.  Imagine a man with two hands right and left free to shake, but forming fists smashing into each other.  What has been injured a subset of fingers or a body?  This is our body at war with itself.

This is the cult of the evangelized individual flung to either the extreme of absolute altruism or absolute self-interest bearing the hazy ache of a concussion.  This individual can not see.  This individual can not hear. 

This individual is fraught with fear.  There is fear of the other, fear that the other will not help the universal unless forced and fear of the other that the individual will be forced, rather than trusted under the auspices of his own free-will.  This is where fear must be shed and trust must flourish to find a healthy medium for the individual to fulfill his concentric duty to his self and the universal.  Our greatest unction is forgiveness.

The tenants of objectivism exclude the presence of the platform of the universal as a mandatory subcomponent of the individual.  Objectivism only sees the pyramid and is blind to the circle.  This internal duality of universal and individual enveloped inside our consciousness is a perfunctory dynamic of free-willed existence.  To ignore this dynamic is to fall in love with one’s self.  It is to attribute all well-doing to one’s self, while standing on the shoulders of the universal bleeding from our eye sockets still blind to our inner duty. 

This blindness is a non-choice to search for the deeper dynamic.  It is not the choice of evil, but the non-choice to begin the task of searching.  The individual yoked to this handicap often believes that the acts perpetuated under such lack of vision are good.  For in reality, like each of us, the act is part good and part evil.  The toil of work, the expulsion of energy to climb the pyramid, the contribution is good.  The failure to recognize the platform of the universal (to see the circle) making that work possible is the evil, which in the individual’s blindness he misconstrues as his own good.  In this confusion is where the greater evils of demands for justice, blood, and the possession of what one deems their entitled share of profit arise. 

Only in acknowledging our duty to begin this task of sight for the first time, will we ever mature into our authentic actualized selves.  To see this way is the beautiful struggle.  This is the struggle of existence.  This is why we called ourselves into free-willed existence.  This is the melody of balancing forgiveness.

We see the beauty around us popping exuberantly on each face, on each individual as part of a common one on this planet or any dwelling in all of universal existence.  We see beyond time, beyond the shortsightedness of prayer, of war, of justice, of petty jealousies, into a ubiquitous faith innate to what is life, what is art, what is nature; growing swarming, singing in a harmonic resonance without words, in tone understood like Mozart aesthetically beautiful without the constriction of human tongue, but breaking the barriers of us as an individual expounding our oneness in the common beauty of everywhere, of everything, of ourselves.  This is the meaning of life.

We are never alone in this.  The people we see all around the perimeters of our lives; these humans in innumerable infinite parallel lines; we are all just one big line.

Einstein could fathom that energy and mass were transmutable.  Time dilates with gravity.  My human brain finds it difficult to even begin to contemplate the ramifications of the fourth dimension of time or infinite universes beyond our own on my frail miniscule body.  For God, time and physical space are both independent of God’s paradigm.  God has no time and no physical matter to constitute a mass.  These four dimensions: length, width, height and time are just us.  In the merging of all these paths we are but one stream. 

These choices we make everyday are a matter of our limited human perspective.  We must transcend our definition of a human paradigm to ask questions.  Will I feed my fellow man?  Will I ask for help?  Do you hear me?  Do you see me?  Will I accept the task of choice?

Living hand to mouth, tied to cuffs of debt, unlivable wages, fingers stretched: Kroger, rent, children’s faces, there is nothing left.  No 1980’s utopia.  We are the Somali refugee in Nike’s eating our own body to sustain respiration.  Our paradoxical belly bulges.  Two negatives collide, not for nourishment, but consciousness.

How we do what we do matters, because we are all connected in such ways.  In every religion masquerading as its own form of flawed and beautiful politic, every face, every skin tone, every unborn life, every stricken cancerous body, every immigrant, every alien, every planet, every song; we are but one.  Why are we here: love or fear?

Our flaws, our weaknesses are but opportunities for others to curve into the angle of that puzzle piece like a light beam bending on the gravitational force within our being and converge to blur their single parallel line into our collective united path.  

To Epilouge