Introduction

Additional Notes on How I Learned to Love the Lord

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what I wrote earlier today. Mostly I’m not too satisfied with it. I feel like things could have been more lucid and more interesting. There was so much that I could have said that I did not end up saying. 

Faith or lack thereof is a challenging thing to express. There was a lot that just got lost or at least that’s my feeling. 

The story that I told myself as a Christian was that I was a reformed criminal that found redemption. Reformed criminal? I was a kid that did something dumb but in my mind, I might as well have been knocking over liquor stores or have been some kind of budding serial killer. I had a desire to convey to people what a wretched sinner I was if I ever got the chance. I look back on this and I’m both amused and disturbed. 

People give reasons for doing things. I don’t know that I buy too many of the standard answers given about why someone takes the dive for J.C. especially if it is couched in theologically “correct” language. People can say that they became conscious of their sinful nature and of their need for a savior but I often suspect there is a more interesting, more honest, more genuine reason. If someone tells me they believe simply because they like Jesus or it just kinda seems correct or just wants it to be true then I respect that a lot more than some bullshit they half remembered from a text book or a tract or something. Wow, this paragraph sucks. Moving on. 

My faith was nonsensical. It was utter bullshit. It basically revolved around feeling guilty for having sexual desires. I got really tired of hating myself for natural desires so I kinda just said fuck it and quit. Hating myself for liking the idea of sex made no sense. I wasted a bunch of time hating myself for a stupid reason when I should have been hating myself for being a Republican. 

The marriage between evangelical Christianity and conservative politics is an awful thing. It’s destructive. It baptizes ideas like peace through strength, low capital gains taxes, gutting the social safety net and other abominations that make the world a terrible fucking place to live. I can’t be part of that no matter how bitchin’ those praise songs are. 

It’s ultimately just not a very adult way of looking at the world. Adult is the wrong word. I just don’t think it’s a very honest way of looking at the world. 

Aight. So, I’m gonna blow away the dust. Blow the dust off my soul. Gonna awaken from my comatose state. 

That’s what life is, kids. 

It’s a series of awakenings. 

It’s staring at cave drawings. 

The f-f-flicker of fire’s light against the cold stone. 

The stick figures the aliens left us to tell us who are god(s) were. 

The warmth of the burning bush

feels like the home you can never remember 

The voice that comes from it sounds like

FRED MCFEELY ROGERS 

it tells you it’s a lie

and that you shouldn’t be afraid 

and that you’ll go home some day 

but until then 

you carry the medicine.

I guess I think about a lot of things but that really don't make me special. I like to think that I have no illusions about what I am.

I'm nobody.

I'm a scared boy.

I'm faking it just like you. No, I'm not a serial killer, you sick fuck. Fuck out of here with that.

I guess I'm glad to be alive. Thing is, nobody taught me to live. Not really. Does anybody get taught?

Sometimes I'm filled with dread. I think about all the things I'm not gonna be able to deal with that day. That tends to suck. That's a fucked up thing to do but I do it sometimes.

What I See

I’m typing this as I sit in the office. For all I know, someone is going to walk up to me with a crisis any second. I’ve usually been going “home” (I’ll explain the quotation marks another day.) and engaging in this exercise this week but I’m afraid that I simply won’t have the motivation after the work day is done so here I am. I type fast. As odd as it is to say, I’ve been typing since I was a kid. I’ve been told that I’m an angry typer. Now that I’ve just typed that, I’m cognizant of the noise my typing is making.

The office is quiet. The people with offices are all buttoned up in them.

I’m buttoned up in my thoughts but not really. I guess I’m trying to be buttoned up in them. How the fuck do you manage to be truly present in your thoughts? Shit. That reminds me of all the talk of mindfulness. Practice mindfulness so you can be a better employee. The CEO should practice mindfulness so that maybe he doesn’t feel so bad when he has to lay off a bunch of people. Maybe the homeless should practice mindfulness so that homelessness might suck less.

I’m getting political now. I’m sick of people who are sick of everything being political. There is a political dimension to everything. Nah. Nope. It is deeper than that. Everything is political. There is no divorcing the personal from the political.

See, the piss of the political class gets on me. There is no escaping that. Even if I never mentioned the name of a politician or a political party or anything in my written emo ruminations, the forces that these things exert touches my thoughts whether I want to acknowledge it or not. I’m choosing to see these things. The bitch of it though is I feel like I cannot un-see them even if I want to. I don’t want to make myself into some kinda god damn martyr but there is a real price to pay for awareness. It ain’t pleasant and it really kinda sucks.

I woke up one day and I took a look around. It didn’t use to be this way but every job I saw was some kind of temporary or contract job. A job that offered barely a living a wage and that offered terrible or no benefits. I don’t know when exactly almost every job I came across became like this but that’s how it is now. I’ve been in such jobs. Those precarious gigs offered by companies who have smiling minorities plastered all over their websites. Look, listen to me, okay? Almost any organization that has pictures of smiling minorities in their advertisements is up to some shit. That’s just the way that it is. Apparently, since the year 2005, almost every job that has been created is a contract job. You ever hear the term precariat? It’s a portmanteau of proletariat and precarious. That’s what we’ve got. We’ve got a work force that is in a permanent state of precariousness drifting from temporary job to temporary job for years and for years. We’re a nation of Uber and Lyft drivers. We barely noticed that shit. Do stand-up comics who get HBO specials talk about this? Is this a plot point in romantic comedies? Hell no. Most of us have been too busy working to notice.

I guess being a flake who constantly had to look for work has its advantages because that had a lot to do with me noticing that trend. It’s not like it’s hidden. You can Google it but it just doesn’t get emphasized all that much. After a long day of working hard so that the boss can buy another Bentley, who wants to think about the fact that a lot of us find ourselves in a terrible position?

What else do I see? I see more transients in the suburbs. I’m a sheltered kid from the ‘burbs. I’m used to going to an urban area and averting my eyes when the stench of the homeless tickles my nostrils. Thing is though, I don’t have to go to an urban center to see homeless people. I see them more and more in the suburbs now. I see people sleeping rough. I see people panhandling. I bring this up to people I know to see if they notice this too and I’ve gotten asked if I called the cops cuz that’s scary. I’m no sociologist. I’m an expert in precisely nothing. I think what I’m seeing is the decay of a society. I find myself wondering how many of those sleeping rough on the streets of the suburbs once owned houses there.

See. You are being psychologically abused. Yes. You. I’m talking to you. You are being gas lit. The TV tells you that the economy is booming, that jobs are being created left and right and that the country is becoming great again but you know that that’s all complete bullshit because you have EYES. You actually live in the world that they supposedly are describing. That fucks with a person.

So, I see what I see and what I see is a society that is decaying, rotting. What is society becoming?

A fascist police state. It’s nascent right now but fascism is here and it will get worse. Trumpism is conservatism in America. The media loves to parade around these allegedly sane and respectable conservatives who don’t much like the Trumpster but here’s the thing, THEY FUCKING LOST. The man is the party now and Trumpism will be with us after one too many Big Macs finally stops his heart. A certain segment of this fucking country loves him because he says the shit they say in taverns loudly and proudly. He’ll make all of those dirty, criminal Mexicans disappear. We got ourselves an efficient deportation task force in ICE. We got privately run facilities that ICE throws detainees into. Children are being ripped from their mother’s arms. People get abused in all sorts of ways in these facilities. Right now, the people subject most to the police state are undocumented immigrants and people of color. That who it is today. It’s going to be somebody else tomorrow.

The reality is this, okay? We’ve got a septuagenarian ex-game show host with a mean streak and a thing for vindictiveness who has control over a nuclear arsenal and the most sophisticated surveillance grid ever devised. I’ve reminded people that this septuagenarian ex-game show host could possibly end human civilization and it gets laughed off.

An unwillingness to engage with the world as it really is could be deadly.

That’s what I see.

Humidity makes me think of madness. Makes me think of the heart of darkness within you. C’mon. Show it to me. I’m sure it ain’t so bad. Tie headband like 80s action hero and nod to you. I got you. Hold my hand if it’s the end. Hold it tight. Tight. Like you mean it.  Do you mean it? I do. I think I do. 

Shit. Tryin’ to remember what that was like. Trying to mean something that scared you. That traumatized you. That weighed you down like a motherfuckin’ Anvil that got put there by Bugs Bunny when he had the devil in him. What’s something like that? Love, baby. Love. Right? Love that’s a WMD. Love that leads to accidents. Love that leads to words arranged in a certain way that come to priests at night when they think maybe the cloth wasn’t such a good idea. Trying to mean the words you pluck out of the air just for a quiet nod and an “I feel you.” It’s hard to mean things. 

Hard to find what the fuck you mean. Like really mean, man. You with me? Think 10 things. Count ‘em. Do you take them into a dark room with you? Are they any good there? Do you really want them there with you? Do you cringe 15 years after telling someone that one time you felt the spirit really strongly or some shit?  

Fuck

Fuck. 

When the boss on his shit again and I got a head full of commie propaganda on a Monday

When it’s one way and I need it to be another

God damn it, good looks don’t pay fuckin’ bills. 

Fuck. 

She whispers it in the dark

when she wants that love harder.

At the sky 

when you got nothin’ but the rain, your sweat, your bones and a raw deal. 

Gotta watch who hears you say that 

Not sacred 

but it’s something, ya know? You feel me? Am I talkin’ crazy? 

Fuck. 

I'm faded.

Can I tell you about how I can love you?

Yeah.

With my hands

and my tongue

and my soul, baby.

In some kinda half-asleep state some time this morning or last night, it occurred to me that life is a trip. Yeah, I mean trip in a similar sense to a trip one might take on psilocybin mushrooms or LSD. Life is the trip. It's all a trip. That sounds like utter bullshit but I mean it. I'm being completely sincere here.

I knew at some point I would touch on my exepriences with psychedelic compounds. I just didn't really know it would be today. I am not a veteran psychonaut by any stretch of the imagination and it's not something I ever thought I'd do. If you told me a decade ago that I would develop an interest in psychedelics, I would have thought you were quite insane. My experience at this current time has been exclusively with psilocybin mushrooms which are popularly known as "magic mushrooms."

The first thing I became aware of even at relatively low doses of psilocybin was my personality coming apart. Basically, I would become aware of all the parts that make up me. All of these parts are distinct.

There is a part of me that freaks out almost instantly and is basically a slave to fear. I was acutely aware of the sound of this part's voice, its presence.

There is another part that is calm, analytical. It speaks in soothing tones. It's wise. It says, "Hey. You're just tripping, dog. It's okay."

There is yet another part that is suave, ultrasexual and rarely seen by anyone really.

I can also recall being aware of the words I was saying internally being audible as a whisper in my head or something similar.

It's almost a given that I'm going to cry during a trip. I don't mind this much.

Visual hallucinations really don't intrigue me that much. It's about the thoughts that come to me.

I'm barely scratching the surface here.

I'm typing this on my phone at work. I'm trying to not look as idle as I actually am. I'm playing the part of the dutiful employee. In less than an hour, I plan on sneaking out of here. There isn't jack shit anyone can do about it.

I managed to get an appointment scheduled with a therapist on Monday.

I guesss I'll end on that note.

Nothin’ in my head 

except the lies 

duct taped together 

that make the dream we live in breathe 

down our fuckin’ necks.

that breath is warm, sista or is it brotha?

smells like cheap perfume worn by Lady Liberty 

 after Elon Musk gave her a roofie 

then he went to the stars 

and forgave y’all’s sins 

but said hell no to stock options for all 

and tickets to the billionaire’s ball. 

Never alone 

got alphabetical men listenin’

to midnight confessions 

of dangerous love 

that will make them drink 

and die one of those deaths 

that ain’t quite official.

-----------------------------

You just kinda start. You see where things go and then you get stuck. That’s okay, I guess. 

Thing with dreams is 

sometimes they are just too shiny 

and they blind you. 

Dreams burned into your brain 

by people who finished school 

and always work late

and you can never tell the difference 

between yours 

and theirs. 

That kills.