Forest Magic

 Oh for a thousand breaths of forest air. To sit on a log and wave my feet at the leaves. Dead or alive, they still dance. Oh to live a hundred lives, a thousand years, until eternity and I grow sick of one another. The sunlight speckles the soil, fighting the shadows but never so well as to cease to be special. Scurrying squirrels refuse to pick sides, yet chatter with chipmunks about the benefits and strategies of each.


Magical morning passes to acquiescent afternoon, who allows effervescent evening. But midnight, midnight is mournful. When the earth has fled and the fairies and sprites have reminded me of their existence, then will I breathe deeply. When the trees shake their tired limbs and our foreign world is coated in paint of a different hue. But I don't join my friends when they snag their snouts in the stars to sing, for I know that white globe to be where the earth has gone, and I don't want it back.


I will walk with a silent tread that only the flowers with their tilting ears can hear and forget how to breathe.

Incepted to Discontent

Inception. It's a crazy movie that leaves you guessing at the end... is Cobb in a dream or not? Is that spinning top about to tip, or not? It provides a good night of action, drama, confusion for the brain, and maybe a couple minutes (or hours!) of conversation after the credits roll. But when it comes down to it, inception is just an idea. Or is it?

Our culture has been clever, very clever. Some may say too clever. I would like to suggest that the culture has found a way to perform inception upon us, and while we are awake no less.

Now before you think I've totally lost it, please give me a chance to defend myself. Cobb himself, in the movie, claims that the most resilient parasite is an idea, and thus this is what the culture has sought to shape. Tell me that music, movies, books, TV, even the commercials themselves, do not do this, and I will call you a liar. Music champions everything from love to sexual triumph, from wealth of possessions to pride in oneself, and on down the list. High schoolers in movies are portrayed by flawless twenty year olds, and a failure to have flat abs is the cardinal sin. A party with pumping music and the requisite alcohol is necessarily a good time, and it is a proven fact that whiter teeth make anyone of the opposite gender flock to your door.

We are told what looks good, smells good, tastes good, sounds good, and feels good. All five senses are accounted for, as well as your consequent morality. If partying feels good, it must be right. Gratification of the self becomes the chief virtue, the less delayed the better (because, of course, if you are delaying, you are wasting time that could be spent shoveling money in to the companies).

Then comes the creation of a vicious cycle. We are both the consumers and producers of culture. As we are told what to desire, we desire said object. Our increased demand perpetuates the existence of said object and others of its kind, though each modification is acclaimed better and more satisfying. However, for all the culture seems to promise us flawless skin, thirty pounds off of our current weight, and a life that will never make us cease smiling, we have not found satisfaction. We have not found the end of the race, for then we would lose the need to chase these temporal remedies.

The culture offers not satisfaction but dissatisfaction, for it is only the dissatisfied person that feels the need for a product. Contentedness brooks no need. Rather than offer us hope, ads point out that we have none and then offer a quick, 100% guaranteed solution that will have us panting before them.

The culture has performed inception upon us, but I suggest that we starve the beast. Let us not buy in to the images that fail to satisfy, that project lies to our consciousness. Let us be critical consumers, ones that recognize the falsity behind the billboard models and swimsuit ads. We may throw off the inception of culture's ideas, not by disclaiming their method, but, ultimately, by claiming contentedness.

How are we to do this though? I suggest that we claim contentedness, not by finding it, but by having it given to us. It is given by none other than Jesus Christ the son of the living God.

Everything on earth is vanity. What wisdom, virtue, or riches will not pass? Build a legacy, and even that will fade and twist with memory and time. The righteous and the unrighteous die; the wise and the fool perish. Death comes to all. Make a change in the world and the next generation undoes your work, or someone else inherits that for which you toiled. Where is the fairness on this earth, where is equality? Nowhere but death.

Contentedness cannot be found on this earth. Mere resignation is the best that can be achieved. However, contentedness can be found in something eternal, something untarished and good. Only if contentedness is rooted in something that does not change can it be called true satisfaction; otherwise it is a mere mountain peak between the rolling hills of dissatisfaction.

Just

At about 1:05pm, I started expecting murder.

Perhaps I ought to explain myself a bit. One typically doesn't say such things, and when they do, they are usually suspected as the perpetrators of said expected murder. Never is it possible that they could be simply hoping for a little excitement... as long as that excitement, happening to someone else of course, provided ample respite from the humdrum routine of daily life. Who invented routines anyway?

But I'm getting off track again. Let me premise the state of my mind: I had been reading murder mysteries all day. Sometimes the pages dripped with blood and other times they lay limp from seemingly harmless causes. Smelling them proved to be no help, as much as I stuck my nose in among the dry leaves, and only my fingerprints covered their seams.

Yet one of the books, Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie, had no murder. To be fair, it had its share of natural accidents and faked deaths, threats and secrets, but no murder. I found myself tense the entire book, only to let out a somewhat shaky breath at the end, both relieved and insulted that I had had no need to harbor worry.

It's odd, if you think about it. I had been expecting murder. You could argue I even wanted it, an accusation I would stoutly deny. Of course, you could take the other line of approach, saying, "It's just a book, just fiction. Who cares?" Indeed, who does? Does the presence of others' care validate or necessitate your own? But to avoid that tangential, though interesting, rabbit trail, I'd like to maintain that fiction imitates life. Fiction is about life, whether in the form of humans or forms otherwise anthropomorphized. It concerns struggles, victories, and defeats, all the normal ingredients of life. Your battle might be conquering that ever-encroaching migraine while juggling your ever-lengthening to-do list, but I say that you are fighting off our time's serpentine beasts as surely as had you been clad in armour and wielding a sword. I won't say anything of your skill or success just yet. The bridge between real life and literary life merits a longer consideration to be sure, but I hope you will take my word, for the moment, that in some way our expectations for fiction, though aggrandized, mimic our expectations for real life. 

So what does my deadly fascination reveal? And let me tell you, I want the answer as much as you. Maybe more.....

I think it shows how we, as a society, as people, as whatever you like, think. We deem the grand as deserving of our attention, whether it's grandly wonderful or grandly morbid. Think about it. If you got up, went to work, came home, and in short had all the components of an average day and none of the extraordinary ones, what do you reply when someone texts you to find out what's up? "Not much," you say. "Just work." Just.

But why "just"? Without the just days, we would never get to the amazing days. Without the ordinary, we would never have the extraordinary. How often do you read a book or watch a show where the character goes about his just day? He or she wakes up, yawns, and pours a bowl of cereal. Or, if you like, grabs a coffee thermos and runs out the door. Works, types at his or her keyboard, checks emails, maybe responds. Feels important, feels shunned, feels overused, feels worthy, feels loved, etc. Then he or she goes home, goes to bed, and gets ready to do it all again. Just like you.

You don't read books like that. There aren't many, except perhaps some more modern pieces pointing out the extreme lack of such pieces. No, the hero is introduced to his quest and goes to complete it. Sure, there may be waiting phases, but if they lasted as long as ours typically last, we'd put the book down, switch off the TV, and get on with it.

Now, I'm not bashing the heroic days. Or the downer days. They are interesting. They are, pardon me the cliche, the stuff stories are made of. But I'd like to put in a word for the little guy, the forgotten day, the in between day. The waiting day. The just day. He's the bridge to your adventure or sorrow, the slope stuck leading to or from the valley or mountain peak.

But it's not just the inevitable necessity of the just days that I'd like to celebrate. You see, it's all about how you act on your just days. If your a class-A act on your just days, there's a better chance that you'll remain so during your highs and lows. If, on the other hand, you're simply a cad all around, well, your situation isn't going to change that much. Your just days are your most usual time, and, as such, they comprise most of the time given to shaping your character. A couple good highs or really tragic lows aren't going to alter what you've already etched into your skin. They might paint you a different color for a while, but all paint chips.

In the end, gilding is a cover for what's just underneath.

A (Poetic) Reflection on Relativism

To be a Liar and Christian in America
One must only pretend that it's right
Everything is misunderstanding
Truth cannot have a bitter bite

Reinterpret the lines with the times, the place, and me
As ocean molds, bowing, to the sand
The past has been wrong before - I was born this way -
A solid heat will melt this land

Control and power dance as twin dragons stealing fire
A deadly dance threatening each turn
Presence implies purpose, and purpose approval
Let's sit back to watch the world burn

Why can't you let me be as I was made to appear?
We're not so different, you and me
You want truth and I want lies, but it's all just talk,
Freedom of speech, equality

To be a Liar and Christian in America
Take the Bible's word as you take mine
Trade your pen for a pencil and make sure it's fast
As we erase that thin fine line.

Vigilante or Villain?

In the Batman movies, clearly Batman is portrayed as a hero. Though sometimes he seems to make the wrong choices, usually as the result of pressures to present a reasonable facade through his life Bruce Wayne as well as to maintain the balance between his egos, he in general is held up as the salvation of Gotham. I would like to discuss whether or not Bruce Wayne as Batman made the proper choice in becoming a vigilante patrol for the crime-ridden streets of Gotham.

Now the advent of Batman was demanded by the corruption coursing through Gotham. Both the police quarters and the government had their share of people in the pay of the drug lords, and then some. As such, the law no longer functioned as an objective standard against which everyone stood for judgment. It had become a subjective standard against which only those without connections or money stood for judgment, while those with such benefits went scot-free. Since the system was failing, the introduction of the Batman sought to amend those failings. Batman was to enforce the law as an objective standard, because whereas the drug lords could bribe the judges, witnesses, and etc, they could not bribe Batman. From him, they would receive their payment of justice.

In this way, it is true that Batman is the idea he seeks to become. An idea cannot be killed, just as justice cannot be destroyed, only momentarily thwarted. Thus, Batman patches up the holes in the corrupt justice system of Gotham.

However, the problem arises in that Batman is not merely an idea. As he says, "An idea can be anyone." The important point that I want to focus on here is the stress that the embodiment of an idea must be someone. True, that it can be anyone, but nor can it be no one. As a result, the idea of justice, or the patch of the idea of justice, that Batman is also feels the weigh of a real person. A vigilante must necessarily be a person.

As such, I would like to argue that a vigilante cannot help become a villain at some point, if they continue down the same path without tapering or stopping. A vigilante takes justice into their own hands, whether partially or wholly. By so doing, they threaten to remove justice from its objective standard and subjectify it through their own conceptions of justice. By preserving some part of justice, they may only preserve that which they conceive to be justice, an idea which may or may not hold true to the objective standard.

The more they continue to do so, the more they may realize that justice relies on their actions rather than vice versa. The potential then arises for a vigilante to see any of their actions as the actions of justice, thus making the idea bow to their treatment. Instead of judging their actions based on ideals of justice, their actions have become the ideals of justice, regardless of what they are. This then carries the potential for justification, a state that will let the vigilante excuse any of their actions as the necessary call of justice. Thus it seems that the vigilante could descend on a path quite opposite the cries of justice but yet justify themselves and their actions based on the ideal, as they have made it defined by themselves.

There is no assurance that Batman, the previous defender of true justice, would not become its greatest antagonist. An objective standard in the hands of one person can be no better than a subjective standard, a standard subject to the flux of human emotion and thought. 

Thus, while Gotham can praise Batman as its hero who maintained justice's objective standard in a time of crime and corruption, it can likewise praise Batman for hanging up the cape.

Routine (part 5)

Those of you that have stuck with Maximilian, Sarah, and I, I must thank you. Thank you for your attention; I hope I have earned it. I hope too that you enjoy this final installment of Routine.


Maximilian, now transfixed, followed her without a complaint even in his mind. Curiosity, wonder, and fear tinged his thoughts now, and he even failed to consider whether the shards of wood might give him a splinter as Sarah led him on through its shattered remains.
Past the blockade, Maximilian was able to see what he never could have glimpsed from his house – a car sat hugging its headlights around a telephone pole, attempting, unsuccessfully, to become one with it. Its hood had become ruffled, allowing a steady thin line of smoke to escape. The rest of the car imitated the jagged crumple of the hood, crunching in on itself. Two white airbags filled the space in the front.
Suddenly, Maximilian gagged. He hung on to Sarah as he bent over, relieving his stomach of its daily allowance of biscotti. He knew the scent now, though he was right that he had never smelled it before. He had smelled it in animals of course, in mice stuck in the walls of his childhood house, but never in humans. Death. Death mixed with smoke and burnt rubber. Sweat and fear and inevitability. Panic.
But his feet refused to move, for all that his brain shouted at him to run away. Then, inexplicably, he felt himself drawing nearer. Perhaps it was sick curiosity that moved him, or a simple desire to find proof for the denial he begged to be allowed to make. Maximilian knew cars didn’t drive themselves – despite his inclination to reduce his interaction with the machines as much as possible – and the release of the second airbag confirmed at least one passenger. Sarah had led him here, and he wondered at what gruesome scene the child was running from, glad at least that she had been able to run.
Maximilian looked down to query her, but, doing so, found no one by his side. The street was empty but for himself, the car, and his fears, and though he swung his head about, he saw her nowhere.
His captor and leader gone, he could go home. He could walk away, shut his door, and forget what he had seen. It wouldn’t be hard. As long as he never looked outside his kitchen corner window, as long as he never found the shattered “Road Is Closed” sign with his eyes. A simple pulled shade would be enough to solve that.
A quiver shot through his nose at the thought, but it changed quickly to a wrinkle of disgust at himself. He was already out, wasn’t he? He was already here. And, he told himself, if he didn’t find Sarah’s parents for her, wherever she was hiding, she was likely to come back to his house with another knock and ten more annoyances.
Edging forward, Maximilian gasped at the scent that struck his nose, the scent emanating from the car. It was too late to turn around, for he could be sure that the putrescence had wrapped itself around him, clinging to him as surely as the fetid air he walked through. He might as well continue, so he did, stretching forward a hand and opening the driver’s side door.
Never before had he so reviled being proved right. His eyes jumped over the poor man, the driver, to find what could only be his poor wife, the passenger. Mercy found him where it had departed from these people, and he didn’t have to open the other side door to so discover the pair. It was no wonder that Sarah had come to find him, he decided, and he began to regret the voracity with which he had tried to bar her from his sanctuary. She was only a scared little girl after all, and he applauded the tears she had shed, a small number he now judged.
Then he gasped.
As he had withdrawn his eyes from the car, they had traipsed over the back seat. Laying there, neck slumped at an uncomfortable looking angle, was Sarah, one of her pigtails thrown off kilter by the tilt of her head. There could be no mistaking the blood on her shirt.
Maximilian stared at the body of the little girl, expecting her to open her eyes any second, cry and beg him to take her back to his house, a Herculean challenge he would readily undergo. But she didn’t twitch anywhere, not even her chest, which denied any ascension through the air, steady or otherwise.
Maximilian bowed his eyes, and found the teddy bear yet in his hands. Pulling it up to his eyes, he inspected it for the previous tear and snot stains that had streaked its fur but found nothing save the pristine condition he insisted that all his animals maintain. It wasn’t even damp.
He would go back and call the police from his seldom-used phone, inform them of the situation. Maximilian became very grateful that his job was that of a mere messenger, not that of the person sworn to attend the message he would bring. He did not envy them their task, particularly the dragging out of that tiny, broken body in the back seat. Maximilian turned to go back to his house.

Before he departed the gruesome scene though, he ducked into the car once more and left a large black bear sitting on the seat next to a tiny little girl named Sarah.

Routine (part 4)

And the story continues.....


Maximilian, having otherwise paid religion of any and every sort no attention throughout his life, began begging any and every god he could think of for help. He even attended any supernatural presence that might be up, or around, or out, there, just in case. He wouldn’t have himself lose help on account of names and semantics.
Maybe the girl, Sarah, needed a little ushering. He nudged forwards his hand, but she only used that to take a couple steps forward then stopped, still locked to his hand. Another nudge merited the same, and gradually it seemed less and less like he was encouraging her outside and more and more like she was leading him into the not-so-great outdoors. When his foot scraped the lip of the threshold that typically held his door in place, he arrested the progress. He was an adult, damn it, and he would not be forced into action by a child.
Had he merely released his fingers, Maximilian would not have been able to struggle free from Sarah’s grip. As it was though, he took her hand so tightly in his that the pressure on the back of her hand forced her fingers loose before he flung the entire offense away. In practically the same motion, he snatched his bear back, though he was careful not to hug it to himself. It would require several baths in disinfectant before that would be even a possibility to be entertained. Two big steps placed him properly within his house, and he closed his door as much as possible, its frame creaking in complaint.
Maximilian acted so fast and so fearfully that Sarah only had time to gasp before Maximilian was hiding behind his door once more, head peeking around the wood. When she realized where he was though, she didn’t cry. She didn’t restart her symphony of sobs, nor did a sniffle run anywhere near her nose. She only stared at him, her blue eyes deep lakes that threatened to drown him if he were not careful.
“Don’t look at me like that!” he demanded, voice whining. “You’ve had your sob; now go find your parents.” He stared right back at her as if she would rush back into his house if he blinked.
“I need you to find my parents.”
“No, you don’t. You got lost on your own, and you can get found on your own.”
But she only stared at him.
And elicited another sigh from Maximilian. Apparently, all the gods in the universe had conspired against him to leave him in this plight – or they had simply ignored him, he couldn’t be sure. Last time he ever tried their phone line though.
“Look, I’m not going to walk miles or anything,” he said.
She said nothing.
“And I’m not giving you the bear.”
The door began to creep open.
“I’m just with you until we find another sap to turn you over to. I have things to do, after all.”
And the door shut behind Maximilian Culbern as he took his first step outside in twenty-seven years and tried not to breath. Breathing required inhalation, a clever path all the terrible scents of the world had found to weasel their way into his system and torment him. He handed over both the bear and his hand, resigning to a march of misery. Soon, the scents would come.
They weren’t as bad as he had remembered though, when he finally took a breath. Maybe his memory had failed him, but more likely, twenty-seven years had been time enough for the world to solve some of its problems. He was just glad it had finally clued in to the proper priorities.
Still, it wasn’t all roses and rainbows walking outside. For one, he hadn’t slipped on shoes, for they had become a near obsolete commodity to him, save for one pair of cushy slippers. He remained convinced that each pebble was a thorn placed judiciously in his path, even when the many stops he demanded of Sarah revealed nothing of the kind of malicious weapons he imagined. Even the ground, where it hadn’t been peppered with mines to be avoided, was rough enough on his poor, sensitive feet.
That, and he was starting to smell something. Without realizing it, he took another sniff, anxious to solve the mystery. He might say he had never smelled anything like it before, but he wouldn’t rush into such a claim without better testimony. It got stronger as Sarah led him on. Almost as if she knew where to go, her feet fell confidently on the ground. It must have been because she had shoes on and didn’t have to dodge the vicious rocks scattered overtop.
Then Maximilian noticed it.
A distance from his house, yet still visible were he to look out the window he never utilized, there was a “Road Is Closed” sign. An orange blockade decorated the road with its garish presence too, reinforcing the message conveyed by the black letters painted across its broad surface.
That was all how it should have looked, how it had looked for longer than Maximilian knew. One day the blockade wasn’t there, and one day it was. He didn’t make a habit of looking out of the window in the corner of his kitchen though, so he wouldn’t know when it had decided to take up lodging on his street. Not that it was a problem for him; he didn’t drive.
But now, its surface was ragged and slit, the wood popping out from the middle, intruding its plain grain on the painted outside. Pieces of the blockade had been flung from it, splinters of wood littering the surrounding road and coating it with orange snow. The blockade had been simple, one board held up by triangle props on either side, triangles that leaned in to the ground now that the center had robbed their neighborly support from one another. They tilted towards one another, trying to regain what had once been so present, so assumed. From their mangled bodies, Maximilian could make out “Ro … sed.” The rest of the words joined the pieces on the ground.
Sarah led on.


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