Personal Journal

Shutters

On a night an afternoon when I shut myself into this hotel room two days ago, I didn’t even notice the harrowing storm just outside my tightly sealed windows. I remember talking to Jean and the phone line was bad, with a blistering digital feedback like some fax machine was trying to act as interpreter between us, and I was annoyed.
But I wanted to shop with her for some adult toys, and I persevered through it, and went to bed never really knowing what was going on in that world beyond this window. This world where I’m a miserable ambassador.

On that afternoon, Darryl McTier drowned nearby as he tested a familiar stream for depth and strength of current as his friends debated whether to cross. He was 11 years old. The water swept his one foot out from under him, he fell into the current, his friends laughed as children will do, not knowing what is happening, and Darryl was lost to them forever.

I sobbed feverishly for him and his family tonight as I read the story in the Baltimore Sun. I wept and the weight of my shortcomings as a man collapsed upon me and again, I was naked before my god, begging forgiveness. Praying for comfort to that family and that community. Eleven year olds aren’t supposed to drown in freak rainstorms. Good boys, who help their little brothers and who keep their rooms without being told, they aren’t supposed to be swept away.

It’s so hard to be human, frail, but oblivious. That day is coming for us all, or god forbid, for our children. We cannot protect them all.
And what wounds me the most are the pinprickings we set upon one another, like the line of the grocery store yesterday, the woman with her Thanskgiving dinner in the express lane. The young adults in front of me who bore their frustrations so passively.
Do you feel it as I do? The seeds of civility withering? The person who cuts in front of you in traffic in plain sight of the red light? The bombast of the music fascist, his bass subwoofer pounding out vibrato like it were a sign of prowess, manliness, or virtue.
I know what’s becoming of us, because I have studied cultures and watched the threads that were cut in the fabric that led them to collapse. No, it’s not all so bad that things disintegrate, because god’s mechanism for the universe includes a means for it to fix itself, over time.
Suffering breeds character, someone said, I think. And to be surfeited must certainly be the converse of that proverb. To have everything destroys character. Enter humility, I suppose. I don’t subscribe to organized religion, but in a world where most people were intellectually incapable, it’s easy to understand how religion instilled the virtue of humility into the masses.
Television does no such thing. It’s vicarious window to excess, to perfection, to consciousless existence, however unintended.

Darryl McTier drowned and I was buying sex toys not even knowing it was storming outside.

I hope when I go to whatever afterlife there is, I can be a student in a private classroom, either with god, or with those teachers with whom I could never study because of time or class or wealth (mostly all of the above). I’d like to know why exactly the single-sentence paragraph preceeding this one is so poignant to me.

What exactly is the philosophical point of this cold realization. I can see the judgemental Christian establishment noting the inappropriateness of the two clauses sharing a single sentence – how something is maligned in the soul that notes such a thing, and of course, it is the appetite.

But like so much of the Christian indoctrination from my past, it’s reflexive redirection toward guild belies the simplicity in which it conceals itself. It’s too easy, it’s too easy to just say that I’m bad, not good, and need to be better. I already know this, as well.

Deep within me, I feel a light shining deep within, I feel as though inside of me, god has a depth which I have yet to discover, and that my reflection upon this subject is a part of the process of leading me further along toward it.

I’m still Pathless1 in ways, knowing I don’t know my path to god. Of course, now I’m also becoming the Prodigal Son, and trying to find my way home to the place where I can recognize, if not comprehend, the heart of my god and accept, if not understand, his place for me in life.

I’m so sorry to the McTiers. You have the full scope of my prayers tonight.
Valle con dios.

Hug your children sometimes, for the strangers like me, who would love them if they could only meet them.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn