Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Study in Black and Blues...


This one, well this one was an accident, no thought, no planning, just letting the fingers do their thing while the mind wandered elsewhere.  It happens, sometimes, when your mind is wandering a fertile place.  I used to have the delightful experience of having it happen quite often when sharing time with the sweethearts who'd entertain with gesture and glance, persona and passion.  They' find a common resonance between hearts and I could let my mind wander in the sweet fantasies they'd portray while snippets of the dreams they wove would fall off my fingers and land on the keyboard.  So since this painting came from almost the same source, perhaps a few favorite rhymes gifted by the lovely ladies might be appropriate... just for the sake of tenderness recalled in a world where tenderness is so rarely called at all...

She a mighty river flows
Smooth to tortured seas
Softening the salt of tears
With her company...


Bring to me that empty place
...that only love can fill,
Lay down close beside me
...trust me hold you still
Until your cry is not to pain
...your shiver not a chill
But rather every nerve brought full
...with any joy you'd will.


Long the night the heroes marched
...between the fell and fen...
And long the night their lovers spent
...in hope they'd see them in.


Darling let me close your eyes with the brush of tender lips
That you might live within this dream that rides my fingertips,
Let me lift you from this place, this troubled midnight stand
Into a realm of glowing light beyond the sins of man
Where love is not a thing of power, possession guarded first
But rather flows in gentle streams to everyone who thirsts.


Found between the light of love
...and flesh where lives the lamp
A subtle zone of power plays
...Where Eros makes his camp.


Set soft the light through evening shade
Set soft the tone of strings
Set soft the gates of heaven's door
To pass an angel wings...


Love so often made of glass
...of several different kinds...
The fluted shapes the blower makes
...or mirrors of the mind.


The muse is an enigma
To the man who feels her touch
For she his heart will open where
A thought dare never brush.


For woman suckles more than babes
She feeds the inner child
Of those she shares her life love with
Across the years of trial.


A broken heart a breach of faith
...a fallen dream's demise...
That covers all the lands in gray
...as teardrops fill the skies.


Lady, roll me like the tumbling dice
When luck is running high,
We'll play for things that mortals know
Make the angels wish... and sigh.


Methinks I'd need a lean fast ship
And a crew with nerve of steel
To slip this line of pirate hearts
And smuggle something real.


No bond of flesh for she and I
...but rather of the mind...
A mating of a man and muse
...that art be left behind.


A softer drama drawn from life
The courage and the heart
To take a wild and wicked world
And work it into art.


Woman flesh makes not a meal
To feed the bodies part
But woman's love a banquet full
To way worn weary heart.



Be with me when the day is new
And the clock our master be
I'll lead the master off a bit
To buy you breath that's free...

Be with me when the day is young
We'll set it to a pace
Will leave us on the shores of sleep
With peace upon our face...

Be with me when the day is old
And I'll build in you a fire
Will take us safe across the night
Beyond all dreams desire.


A vagabond a wandering
Is what I'd mostly been
But there I lingered long enough
To find a group of friends.

***

Dedicated of course to the lasses and ladies of Met Art Live in the years 2006 through 2008, those sweet sisters of seduction who did not seduce to despoil
but rather seduced to free the hidden dreams of hearts besieged... here's to you girls, I do miss you.

Monday, October 28, 2013

The Well: Feet

"Damnation! Talk about a pile a pukin' puppies," was the first thing Tina said when the door was closed.

"Yup," Shelly said as she got settled in, "not much of much at all."

I have to hand it to the girls, they travel in style.  The inside of Miss M would make Rolls Royce take notice.  I was on the jump seat that swings out of the sleeper, I think they stole it out of a Volvo.

"So what are we watching for?"  Shelly asked, busy closing a set of curtains around the windows.

"Tanker trucks," I answered,  "that haul nasty things."

"Oh really," Tina said, and proved she was nobodies innocent. "Like maybe the kind where the drivers all have an Italian accent?"

Thursday, October 24, 2013

To Love a Lass...


I've come to the conclusion it isn't wise to try and imagine her, the woman of your dreams, not to much anyway.  Kind of sets preconceived notions in your head that just might get in the way of recognizing her if and when she shows up in your life.  Better to build her in bits and pieces, traits, attributes, responses, but not really appearance.  Everyone has a double, somewhere, and it could really suck if you build a face and then fall in love with her double who really isn't like her at all.  Johnny Walker's wisdom, don't you know...

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Lesser of Two Evils...

There is no lesser among evils

I've learned something this past year.  I've learned that sadists are easier to deal with than masochists.  Why?  Because it's a whole lot easier to hate a sadist, dehumanize them, dismiss them into the abyss with a look or a double tap of hunter hollow point.  Masochists on the other hand have a bad habit of becoming sympathetic creatures leaching onto the more noble aspects of the species,  they like to latch onto the instinct to protect and nurture, have a way of corrupting hope implanting undefined guilt in their victims so they can manipulate sympathy with the acute pathos of the pain they enjoy.  I've come to the conclusion the majority of the harm bdsm causes the world at large is actually worked through the masochists, not the sadists.  Strange as it might sound to hear this coming from me but all things considered the sadist is actually the lesser 

STOP RIGHT THERE
DO NOT FINISH THE CLICHÉ.


It's an old phrase, the lesser of two evils, and choosing the lesser of two evils is not a good thing to do.  At the point you choose one evil over the other you've just invited corruption into your life.  Yes, you did.  Of your own free will you just chose an evil, now didn't you.  Instead of saying there is no viable choice here, they're both unacceptable, you just rationalized some shade of gray from a reality of jet black.  Evil loves to manipulate people into believing they must choose only from the choices it provides.  Point of fact evil spends a great deal of effort to maintain such lies, it really does, and well it should since those lies provide it a great deal of sustenance. 

There's an awful lot of evil operating these days.  There's always been evil, of course there has, but in varying amounts, varying potencies.  However the sum total of active evil does vary across history, and in this time the level of evil is approaching a critical apogee where societies fail and fall into ruin as a consequence of the toxins created by the evils entrained within.  When I say evil I'm not talking about things that are different or non-conformist, I'm not talking things called immoral where the immorality is a matter of a successful but different form of social or family structure of functional design, I'm talking deep attitudes concerning life and love that degrade life from a viable potential for happiness to miserably sterile self deception in direct proportion to the presence of that thought.

As I look about the ascending evil I find most appalling is the lifestyle known as bdsm, the heirs of Sodom and Gomorra who re-entered the modern world by way of the Marquis de Sade during the degenerate days of the French revolution, an evil that uses the symptoms of the psychiatric disease sadomasochism  as barbarian coinage desperate people must use to buy admittance into that imbedded subculture where mental illness is accepted, accommodated to stasis in order that the afflicted lives so supported will return sustenance to evil inflicting their pain and confusion, their jade and despair on any and every other genuine human being of open heart who chances to come in contact.  I call bdsm enemy.

One of the more consistent things I've noticed about my enemy is the common claim they're not so very different, that they're just like everyone else, just... misunderstood.  Misunderstood may well be the truth of the matter, but it is not they who are misunderstood, in point of fact the situation is quite the opposite.

What was misunderstood by them is the difference between civil safety and rational acceptance.  What they misunderstood was that their right to exist free of harassment does not validate as wholesome and acceptable whatever affliction or aberration of life-style might have brought the harassment down on them in the first place.

The responsibility for this misunderstanding is easily placed.  It belongs to the mental health profession for failing to make clear this difference in its' writings and in its' therapy sessions, and for failing to firmly and very publicly reinforce this point when the minions of bdsm began to seek social comfort by publicly rationalizing their afflictions as something fashionable, desirable, a fine new form of recreation for the jaded using this misunderstanding as justification.  Of course, add a quarter teaspoon of paranoid mistrust to the mix and it's equally easy to see why the mental health profession might not want to correct such a misunderstanding.

The inmates of bdsm are no doubt one of the mental health profession's most stable cash crops.  The greater majority of them are members to have a social circle who will accept without condemnation the kinks and anomalies in their personalities, that being one of the larger hidden values of membership.  Of course, once their lives are committed in such a direction the essence of whatever set them desperate enough to seek such company in the first place must never change.  To heal, to outgrow whatever it might have been would eventually set them as outsiders, different, eventually unwelcome and so of course the community assists any member in good standing in not only enduring their afflictions but in maintaining them… that being the true bondage part of the bdsm lifestyle.  In any case, regardless of their... recreations... they have to be mentally stable enough to stay out of jail, keep a job and feed themselves.  Such mundane maintenance as that is what pays the bills for most shrinks. 

What is not commonly understood by the rest of us, by anyone actually, is the exact nature of the damage caused by exposure to this evil, and lacking such understanding the vast majority of folks kinky or not assume that so long as the perversions are kept hidden away, practiced in private, never spoken of in public then there really is no cause for concern.  The evil of bdsm is totally onboard with this idea, it demands its' minions practice a quite respectable degree of secrecy.  And yet those lives do not exist in a vacuum, in a foreign land or on a separate planet, they are intermingled and interactive throughout the macroscopic society of man.

Every affliction has a definable pathology, there's an entire branch of medical science dedicated to such work.  It is their efforts guide the remainder of medicine in their quest for cures.  Sadly, most of their work is done on what's left of those who've already succumbed to some illness.  Equally many diseases are communicable, transferred from one to another, and again there is a dedicated branch of medical science that studies the ways and means of contagion.  But again, that branch of medicine does not consider the ills and afflictions treated by the mental health profession, until very recently the raw data to begin such work has simply not been available.  But now that such data is becoming available perhaps they should, since any claim that mental illness cannot be contagious is easily dismissed.  From the existing work of psychology it is well known that when extreme trauma is excluded the vast majority of the remaining discomforts and disabilities that are psychological in nature have for their beginnings some weighted interaction with another human being.

Anyone who has ever gone spelunking in their own mind for the source of some shadow on their life can tell you as often as not the originating event, the original source of some shadow turns out to be something that in retrospect is actually quite a minor thing amplified and expanded by later events.  Such searches as that are of course the exclusive domain of the one searching, but what of the nature of the amplification?  How often is the circuitry of  amplification provided by another, often without the searcher being aware of the source? 

These days with bdsm providing an ever enlarging pool of those who present aberration as something fashionable who can say how much extra misery and wasted potential is being burdened on society by their influence?  Who can list the rationalizations running down to outright lies being told to the confused of all ages by those whose abnormalities stand as   justification for a perverted lifestyle?  Just how far do the tentacles of bdsm really spread? What is the true cost, the true risk, of allowing such a contagion vector to exist and expand unchallenged?  I don't believe anyone can answer those questions, but I do think society had damn well better begin trying before bdsm creates a true plague of dysfunction.

Maybe you think plague is a bit to strong a word, to scary a word, but plague is the proper word for the potentials.  The mental health profession has worked long and hard to show the damage done by mental illnesses, but only in macabre fiction has anyone ever attempted to show what life would be like should the illnesses become the average, forms of fiction not surprisingly highly favored by those in "the lifestyle."  Still and all, do the math and if the current growth trends of bdsm continue in a few more years you might find yourself in jail for drug evasion and dereliction of therapy living in a society to make the absolute darkest visions of Poe and Dante, Orwell and Huxley seem totally tame and timid by comparison.  More to the point, you could find yourself living in a land where the count of those stable and sane enough to make any meaningful attempt at a self sufficient society has fallen to a minority to small to maintain civilization, much less anything to resemble a world class culture. 

It isn't the utterly obscene brutalities of bdsm... piercing and floggings, torture bondage and the like... where bdsm poses the greatest threat, not at all.  Those things are barbarian beyond any concealment of their true nature.  No sane person will ever be deceived by the transparent lies and rationalizations offered as justification for behavior like that.  While gross and pathetic at the level of an individual sphere of empathy their only real threat to society is found in just how gross and pathetic they really are, sensational enough to keep everyone focused on the naked body writhing beneath the lash and no one seeing the other and more serious aspects of evil bdsm spreads unseen and unrecognized beneath societies' horrified fascination with the pleading cries and screams of ecstasy heard from some masochist reveling in their chosen form of pain.

The true threat of bdsm is in the culture of secrecy and mandatory secret defectiveness it defines and perpetuates, two traits ideally suited to a state of political tyranny.  The true threat of bdsm is how it installs self degradation as an acceptable coping mechanism to answer the stresses of life, a trait most highly prized by con artists and manipulators of all persuasions.  The true threat of bdsm is in how it barters to jade the addictive narcosis of purely animalistic sensation overdriven in exchange for citizenship in a society of the damned, literally, developmentally damned to the misery of perpetual immaturity and confusion, a state of affairs guaranteed to do deep damage to any life and the society wherein that life resides as the years inevitably make ever more devastating the degree of retardation.

The bottom line on the explosion of bdsm into the culture is that it is primarily the result of Psychology failing to consider the Sociological consequences of its' emergence onto the stage of life as a power player rivaling the religions with which it competes for clientele.  In the short sighted vanity of its' youth psychology dismissed the conventions of history as primitive and unneeded without ever considering the sociological forces that caused those conventions to evolve and endure in the first place.  God does not destroy wantonly, Gaia does not cull without cause, there were solid reasons Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed rather than allow the pathogen of their perversions to spread any further into history.  It's time for psychology to admit their share of responsibility for the modern day iterations of the same mode of thought and help correct their error.

Exposing that error will be the first counter-attack in my war on bdsm, and that while I'm acquiring the skills needed to launch a more effective campaign based on statistical analysis of the data generated by the evolving national health care systems considered in conjunction with census data and data harvested by infiltrating and systematically examining social networking websites such as FetLife that serve the pervert community as primary communication channels.  It is my intention not to assert but statistically demonstrate the communicable nature of mental illnesses using bdsm as a first, and most easily recognized as amplifying, contagion vector. 

With such proof in hand it then becomes possible to engage in the political arena to the intent of empowering an expanded CDC to monitor and publicize the regional density of bdsm so that communities might defend themselves and their youth with local legislation. In society as in nature there must be a balance to all things, and predation on a toxic predator is as necessary as any other part of such balances.  The long history of bdsm proves it is as toxic to life and health as tetra-ethyl lead in the air or just plain lead in the drinking water, the innocent deserve ways and means of protecting themselves from such toxin inflicted unwilling... it is my intent to provide them social and psychological weapons, and train them in their use.

In essence I'm going to take away any legitimacy provided by their support group of profit motivated shrinks, and I'm going to seriously damage the secrecy upon which their subculture is founded.  These two campaigns are things the enemy is already afraid of, I can speak of them at the outset.  However these are but two of my major attack plans, and I promise you, they haven't in their darkest nightmares considered where else they are vulnerable. 

But I have.  You might ask why have you?  Bothered to spend so much time thinking and analyzing on something you obviously find so disgusting that is?  If I were in your shoes I'd be asking that question, asking it rather pointedly as a matter of fact.  The answer to your totally appropriate question is I've had a belly full.

BDSM first attacked my life in 1963 when we had the bad luck to move into a rent house right next door to another rent house that was nothing more than a dedicated dungeon for the bdsm freaks of Los Angeles. The neighborhood sat on a very steep hill, terraced, the houses close set. From the fence in my own back yard I had entirely to good a look at what was going on below, and the concrete retaining wall did nothing but echo the sounds up with perfect fidelity. I tried to tell the grown ups, and was severely punished for a "dirty imagination" as if any innocent child could begin to imagine such things. I was seven years old.

I've had to live with that shit in my head ever since. It scorched my life, likely was the destruction of my younger sister's entire life. It took forty years of soul searching and lucid dreaming through the nightmares to surface the source of those screams, the fragmentary images a shocked and traumatized child's memory was able to retain. It was forty years of self doubt and self condemnation for what landed in my memory totally by accident, and totally against my will.  Forty years diminished and stained before I understood what had happened to me.  If it has happened to me then it has happened to others, it is happening to others. 

Ever since then, give or take every five years for all of my life, someone from that realm has tried to seduce me into misery with that evil, with each attempt validating the nature of the evil by exposing more of how that evil operates, the places in the human psyche and soul that it leaches onto, the functions and structures of society it exploits. I've seen bdsm in the raw, what all the lies and all the public posturings are intended to conceal, and it is my immutable and irrevocable conclusion and judgment that bdsm is an ultimately evil thing that needs to be hunted to extinction, purged, destroyed, and forgotten.

They have tried once to often for me to forgive yet again.  I didn't study Rommel to appreciate Patton for nothing, it is time to fight back. Now that I've satisfied every responsibility of this life I have the freedom to do just that, and that I will do. I am going to set in motion things that in the end will destroy bdsm just as surely as the first atom bomb destroyed Hiroshima. 

I will be returning to the university in the spring with a very specific purpose in mind.  Well, maybe two purposes *grin*, but I'll keep you posted on how the second one develops as events unwind.  In the meantime?  I hear a pool table and a brewski calling my name.


Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Mind Mechanic's Lament

I wonder if there's fix-a-flat to seal a punctured soul
Some can of gunk not to hard on outward inner flows,
Something quick blown right in to fix a leaking mind
Found on sale at Wally's World or ordered off the line.
Or should I ask the bars-leak guys, the radiator crew
For something made here of late slows a mental spew?
Something in a nice teal green, the black will never do,
Check the books will ya guys she's got to make it through.
I've thought to try epoxy glues or fancy emron paints
But those are way to toxic with the fumes in full restraint.
A master with a little mig just might run bead that thin
With all the luck of seventh sons from seven loving kins,
But even so its roll the dice if such a weld would hold
Not when the metal melted in been crystallized and cold.
I went and talked to Permatex and they were very kind,
Said the red would hold alright if new bolts I could find
To wet-torque down a layer on a surface knurled fine
But otherwise all bets were off on such an odd design
As what their books showed to be God's rental-unit line.

*
*
*

Written early in 2009, revised just a touch late 2013... different woman, different problem, same hope... and hope for someone else when you can't really help is the hardest of things.  I hate waiting.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Concerning KJA...

What's KJA, the King James Apocryphal? Does it condemn the wicked?  Praise the righteous?  Did he even have one of those?  Who knows. No, the thought of the day has to do with the Knee Jerk Acronyms America so loves.  The government got it all started of course: ATF, CIA, FBI, NSA... the alphabet soup.  But it’s an important soup, dammit.  It started spreading out as the government migrated into people's daily lives: SSN, HEW, DHS, CPS... things of that ilk, the places where the population interfaced with their government.  Even more important things, you might have those in your day to day life.  I suppose after three or four generations were raised on alphabet soup it shouldn't be much of a surprise that eventually the children decided that if you want to claim something for yourself that sounds really important it should have an acronym of its' own so it can take it's proper place in the bowl with the rest of the soup.  Off to the races they went. Well, more appropriate to say into the bowl they jumped, but anyway.

By now everyone knows which specific acronym I like the least, bdsm, a few folks may even have a bit of an understanding as to why.  However I'm sure there's many who can't begin to conceive of why I feel the way I do.  If they didn't agree with me that I could understand, but they seem genuinely confused as to the reason for the conflict.  Of course, for them those initials are more a flag and tag to a fad gone generation gap counterculture than who can say how much documented misery condensed into four letters for the sake of brevity in print.  So why did they latch onto those four letters instead of say NIMH? (National Institute of Mental Health... fictional villains in an old cartoon movie) It sounds crazy, it may be crazy, but I'm about to believe the answer just might be the first documented case of a major Freudian slip by an entire segment of society.

The kids most desperate to have something sound important about their lives, what do those kids all have in common? What they have in common is surviving an attempt to homogenize them body and soul (not to mention heart and mind) into an image of social perfection.  What they have in common are parents (and grandparents and possibly even great grandparents at this point) so insecure they allowed the ever enlarging domain of psychology to both define and validate beyond questioning their parenting style.  What they have in common is Psychology made God.  The psuedo-science of psychology, which coincidentally has its' very own bowl of alphabet soup to make itself sound overwhelmingly important, ended up taking the place of culture and convention, religion and history.  Psychology is a science, and science won't steer you wrong, right?  Right.

Don't get me wrong here, there's nothing wrong with psychology as such, it's simply the study of the mind.  So what's the problem then?  The problem is when you raise major portions of entire generations using exactly the same parenting techniques taken verbatim from the same few academic sources what you get is some really nasty compression bruising on a good size chunk of the population, those who really didn't fit the mold they were forced into.  Point of fact what you get is a fair size chunk of your population that might as well have been raised in state run institutions.  I'm talking about the kids who were raised to believe social acceptance equates to mental health.

(Well, maybe, but somehow I doubt any institution of psychology has ever bothered to define just what constitutes a society ethically competent to certify sanity, they kind of take that one on faith at least until the insurance runs out.  Of course such a loophole as that leaves the entire situation wide open for any group from a high school clique to an international espionage movement to validate sanity in exchange for loyalty, just pick your poison of preference.)

Anyhow, once they got away from mommy and daddy and into the real world it didn’t take them long to figure out just how bruised they really were, and for no good reason: they found literally hundreds of different societies all intermingled and already up and running.  They realized they had been betrayed, and abused. Instantly their very legitimate question became why did mommy and daddy try and stuff us in that mold when there were so many others that might have been a better fit? After all, mental health had been the holy grail of their life and all the rules said was social acceptance equals mental health.

Long story short it didn't take the kids long to figure out they could certify their own sanity as long as they all agreed, being as how what the hell, as long as they stuck together around some common thought then they were a society too, right?  All they needed was that common thought and their own acronym floating in the soup to serve as a flag and they could be free.  What did they share in common?  Of course, they shared the common facts that had formed them: bitter daddies (playtime is over, go to work and feed your family) and scared mommies (OMG, can I really do this?). 

From the perspective of their ever more enraged inner child what they had in common was bad daddies and sad mommies.  And damn, when they looked around in the bowl of alphabet soup they discovered their flag was already flying!  Bad daddies and sad mommies... BDSM, of course! 

I give you the birth of a fad every bit as dangerous to the cause of genuine freedom and happiness as any and every tyrant that has ever plagued the history of Planet Earth, because  BDSM does not stand for bad daddy sad mommy.  What it has signified for centuries, nay, millennia, are the psychological  accommodations mandated in the lives of those who suffer the psychiatric affliction of sadomasochism, the mis-wiring of the brain to interpret pain as pleasure, deformities that in the end inevitably cause the absolute inversion to destruction of any and every positive emotion possible between any two humans, gender of no consequence, when adopted by those whose brains are not hard wired in such a manner.

It is the most bitter of ironies that the vast majority of the kids swimming in the soup just wanted permission to consider themselves sane, normal, as if they ever needed it in the first place, and all their desire did was lead them into the most subtly destructive and insidious forms of mental illness known to mankind.  The current structures of bdsm are obviously nothing more than the best effort of those so afflicted to contain and limit the damage done to their lives, and the lives of those around them.
*** *** ***

This thought to be continued, and concluded, in the forthcoming post "The Lesser of Two Evils…" at which point this subject will be retired for a time, I need the time to restore my own self and soul…

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Life right here in River City...

I went to the bar today.  Went a couple of days ago as well.  That's out of character for me, believe it or not.  Didn't drink much, just a shot of good whiskey (a silent toast to sweet Alex, my true muse… the deeper I get into fighting this perverted bdsm bullshit the more I miss her) and a brew to chase it down.  Primarily went to play pool.  Once upon a time I shot a pretty good stick, thought it might be interesting to find out if anything had survived the years.  Pleased to report that yes, it's still there.  Rusty as all hell, and the eyes have changed with the years, but yea.  Today I actually won a few games against the lower level tournament players warming up for the evening, pulled off a couple of truly good shots.  Felt good it did to snap a hard two rail bank square in, felt good to make the cue ball tap dance.  It felt very good to see the tournament players offer that nod, the one that means "yea, you just might be competition…"  Think it's time to invest in stick of my own.

And no, the poem doesn't have a damn thing to do with anything involved with shooting pool, it's just kind of there for, well, soul candy?  A reminder of why the fight is worth fighting...

Sonnet to Silence

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Once Upon a Bible...

It was a grim moment in a grim time, the hardest of times.  For all intents and purposes I'd been on my feet for thirty six hours standing by my wife's death bed, waiting out the customary seventy two hours before pulling the plug to set her free of a failed body.  It was hard times.  I was utterly exhausted, the sweethearts crewing the ward were watching me like the proverbial hawk, far more closely than they were watching their official patient, they had monitors on her.  For me reality was beginning to bend around the edges, there just wasn't a whole lot left to work with. 

Desperate for something, anything, to keep me vertical I started rummaging through the room, opening the little drawers and looking to see what was to be seen.  In the little roll around table I found what so many travelers have found in one odd drawer or another, I found a copy of a Gideon's bible.  The volume was untouched, never opened, who knows how long it had lain in that drawer waiting for me. 

I have a history with that book.  I've read it exactly once, as a child and under compulsion.  I didn't get much from it on that pass.  But as the years since have fallen into history I've noticed that I've never lifted any version of that book with an honest heart that it didn't fall open to a passage appropriate to the moment, to the need at hand.  I looked at the cover, and I remember wondering what it might have for me in such a moment as the one I was living.  I riffled the pages several times front to back,  didn't count the passes, just let the pages flip by my thumb.  I don't really recall how many times... six, eight, ten times, and then stopped the pages.  When I cracked the spine, opened the volume to read the passage beneath my thumb I almost decided the Bible had failed me for the first time.  But it hadn't, in point of fact in the months since I've realized it delivered the most timely warning I've ever been given, bar none.  The most timely warning, and the most demanding challenge possible.

What verse was given me?  My thumb was in the middle of the Gospel of St. Jude, the very shortest book of the bible.  Two pages.  You figure the odds. To be specific my thumb pointed to the 17th through 22nd verses of Jude where he speaks of those who choose the instincts of the flesh over the spirit, where he speaks to rejecting the carnal as a sad substitute for the peace of mind only possible to those who live their mortal lives to honor their best understanding of their Creator's ultimate intentions.  It's only a few verses, but it's some very heavy reading.  

In that desperate moment I laughed out loud.  The nurse looked around at me, I'm sure that laugh was bordering on delirious.  I shrugged, she shrugged, I put the book back where I'd found it.  Ok God, I'm not going to go fucking nuts chasing pussy now that you've seen fit to let my wife go home.  Not my style anyway.  I wasn't all that impressed, but still, my tradition held and I remembered what I'd been given.  Some eighteen months later the value of the gift revealed itself to me, sometimes God's gifts take a bit to understand.  As a matter of fact that gift is still giving, and the gift just keeps getting bigger.

There is a man in my town I'm supposed to meet, even though he and I are from opposite sides of the onion.  I learned of him from Omega, he owns the house where her circuit of the bdsm crowd hold their gatherings to stage their perverted recreations.  There's some extremely unsavory things happen in his house. At one point in time I'd have gunned him down in cold blood and just kept walking, taken delight at watching his eyes go from animal to dead.  But no more.  I've come to understand that dealing with my utter revulsion at what he fosters under his roof without resorting to lethal anger and blinding contempt is part of my test as a man.  I'm coming to believe how God views my dealings with him will play a major role in how much support the Almighty will offer me in my desire to put an end to the abomination he embraces, the abomination of bdsm. 

He's reported as a devout pagan, I'm sure he'd find it utterly unbelievable that he owes his very life to that passage about trying to pull the lost souls back from the very edge of the fire found in a copy of the Bible left in a hospital room.  But that's ultimately the truth of the matter.  That oh so timely warning probably saved his life, and my soul.  The Bible is not something I take lightly.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Strange Shore...


  I feel myself an old man
  lost sailing stranger seas
  tacking over gothic reefs
  on bloodied vampire lees 
             …and…
  at times the faces boil up
  aloof stone burning blank
  crest up on a funeral pyre
  burn red-tide airless dank
           … as if…
  the screech of pirate birds
  that prey on nesting gulls
  is all allowed to float 'em
  towards sirens' call above
            …what…
  mutiny murder'n madness
  marooned 'em to such fate
  to crew a Flying Dutchman
  of love run-rigged as hate
            …why…
            …why…
the ancient map's were right
    here there be monsters
          sex serpents
            and death.