Farewell Sweet Gabriel

I have not the heart to continue these tidings: the archangel is dead.

My feet blackened

It has been ten moons since I last wrote from the darker dell. Many things have transpired but nothing changes. Luck, if it were a commodity I would buy some, but I would swiftly lose it in the car, the cushions, the backstreet alley I walk down to get to work. Luck is a lady they say, and I have long been unfortunate with most of those as well. I shiver in the disuse of my skills, shrivelling as I attempt to break out of the box that society has built around the productive people. Weirdos and circles need not apply, we don't fit. We lack focus and drive. We have the world in our sights, but the population is blind. I am stymied. I am shunted into pathways so labrythine that I may never emerge to reclaim that vital core. My sense of direction, long lost, has now returned but points in ways barricaded against escape. Is it worth the effort to raise the hammer once again? Is it worth it to knock on opportunities door before a frame has been planned? I know not. I am disconsolate and grey, my feet blackened by soured experience.

October 14th- The Long Road

Dearest,

I am sorry it has been so long since I have written. We have experienced troubles aplenty crossing from our old life to the new. Consumption has racked our life over the past few weeks, as little has been available, but all has disappeared into the gullets of those that surround. I wish I brought great tidings, but the mundane still dominates.

There was frost on the ground for the first time, not two days hence. Thankfully, we have reached this point before winter tightens its deathgrip. We have seen fewer animals over the past week, however, so maybe it has started without our notice. As you know from our previous ruminations, we have been moderately prosperous this past season, enough to survive, but not much to save for future uses. Ah well, for what more can you ask? To survive is to live, and to live is to hope for warmer times. Without that hope, you might as well lie down and let winter cover you with ice and snow.

Ah, well it seems that the campaign has no wait for the poor ramblings of one such as me. I will write more as I can. We are all restless and must keep moving to avoid the black sleep.

Yours,

BZ

Ruminations

Today, I was asked what it was I had learned in my three-plus decades. I took my time and answered "nothing". The person to whom I spoke took my response as an all-too-familiar sarcastic reply. I was serious. I can honestly say that I feel I know less now than when I was younger. Sure, I have more facts at my disposal, and a well stocked english vocabulary, but I am full of more questions now than I ever was before. Answers are elusive and in multiples. I have become quite comfortable in this state of ambiguity. In fact, I love the chaotic mass of interconnections and pseudo-answers that inevitably climb out of the miasma of questions. I fear the day that I have a hard and fast answer. When I know "truth" beyond the shadow of a doubt, that is the day that I become dangerous to myself and others.

Life after influenza

An Orthomyxovirus

I raised my head; slow, sweat pouring down my face like a pestilential waterfall. I don’t fear death, but I fear the suffering. I looked at the thermometer, 102.4, a new record. I swing my head in an arch, the environment blurs in slow motion. I am ready for it to be over, no philosophizing, reality has come to roost in a delusion-laced existence of extended discomfort. “Stop being a baby,” she says, “It’s just the flu.” True, but a more miserable time I have yet to have. I look on the world from a point external, fogged by vapid virus enriched blood. I don’t complain, too much effort, but the look of pathetic lifelessness hangs about me like a wrinkled suit. No starch, just let me lie here for a while.

for the love of wisdom

lonely is the sound of cicadas in isolation. my ruminations have come to naught. i have chewed on philosophical questions like a cow. eating my own sick repeatedly, attempting to get the last bit of essence from raw material. there is no essence. the process is the gravamen, injurious and full of meaning. even now, i find myself using language charged with meaning, learned through philosophical canticles. i no longer write like i used to, my words are clear and precise, but they obscure as often as clarify. perhaps this is best. all that i hold dear is ambiguous, should not my expression reflect this, a mirror of experience, obscure and complex. i am at a loss. absurdity is assuredly the hallmark of civilization and the education that replicates it. perhaps the surrealists knew more than they understood and merely misplaced it. the juxtaposition of the incongruous is reality, the illusion is that anything is incongruous at all. mighty subjective, but where do the subjective and objective meet? perhaps, where the awesome come into being. awesome: as in inspiring awe and terror. this is the ultimate state of existence. it is, however, much like a near death experience. untenable, except in small doses. otherwise it ceases to exist becoming mere existence. the great human power is adaptability and acceptance. that which doesn’t kill you becomes boring. i am constantly bored, i am discontent, i am alive and constantly dying.