Personal Obligation

Map Theory

2004-10-06T08:58:00.000-05:00

Maps are windows to the past, though many hold a map and pretend they see the future. “Here is where I will go,” they say pointing to a location on a map. That location represents their future to them, but it is actually the past. If I hold a map created in ancient Greece that depicted the streets and shops in Troy, I could point to a location and say, “I’m going there,” but it is impossible. I am pointing to a location that existed in the past, that does not exist today, nor will it exist tomorrow. Hold a street map of New York City, created in 1999, and locate the World Trade Center. Plan your route from any other location in New York to the World Trade Center. Your route is meaningless as you are attempting to travel into the past, into a time when the World Trade Center existed. Sure, you can occupy the exact same coordinates of the World Trade Center as the map indicates, but you will not be at the World Trade Center.

Even if you rely upon real time satellite imagery to take a picture of a city, the picture is of the past, at least is the past by the time you see it. It may only be a few seconds into the past, but it is only an indicator of how the place will be in the future.

Do not trust maps to plan your future. All we know for certain is we are here, right here, at this moment, and this place is as we see it. We can make predictions regarding how it will be in the very near future, but have no way of knowing how it will be in the far future.

“Don’t worry, I have a map.”

Maps, like plans, are crutches. At some point they are almost as valuable as folklore as a way to navigate your future. An explorer has gone to and returned from a remote location, created a detailed map of his journey. He hands you the map and say, “You too can make this journey.” No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to replicate the explorer’s journey. The terrain shifts over time. What has been marked on the map as a creek is now a raging dangerous river. A clearly indicated path on the map has become overgrown with underbrush. Safe drinking water has been become tainted, and a cave used for safe lodging has been taken over by a large bear.

We can’t help but use voices from the past to help guide our way into the future, but we must be fully aware, the past is the past and the future is unwritten, unexplored. Our journey to the future is a singular one. We cannot follow another person’s footsteps exact enough to duplicate his successes and failures. If someone tells you he has the map to success, you know that the map is faulty because it only represents how success was accomplished in the past, not how it can be accomplished now or in the future.

The Umbral Gate, Part VI - FINAL

2004-09-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

“Jesus Christ,” I stammered. Guided by fear, I inserted the key into the lock and opened the little hatch that protected the innocuous button that would detonate the five separate C4 blocks of explosives positioned inside the building at key junctures. The building itself was not the Umbral Gate, the building was just a manifestation of the gate. Torrance had explained that to me when he was in the process of buying it. If it were destroyed, something else would replace it as a gate between the two worlds. The explosives would be a temporary measure, used to slow down the cabal, hopefully slow them down long enough for the Night Coven to stop them on their end.

Torrance had spent quite a lot of time, going back and forth between this world and theirs, learning the Artes from Dame Elsbeth, performing feats of magic that scared the hell out of me. I had grown accustomed to it, though I still found it unnerving. The tattoos that were marked upon his skin gave him abilities no person could naturally have: the ability to see in the dark, increased strength and speed, and amazing endurance. My time with Torrance taught me all sorts of things about the world on the other side of the gate, though I had never seen it. He had told me about dragons and the different kinds of people that existed over there, never did he mention anything that related to this thing stalking down the halls toward him.

Torrance now held off both stickspinners with his shadowstaff. Though he was able to keep them at bay, he seemed unable to make any progress in beating them back. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the monitor. I sensed Rex moving, but I figured it was restless anxiety at being stuck in the midst of a fight that wasn’t his.

“Torrance will be destroyed shortly,” Rex said. I was shocked at his callous prediction and spun around to face him. He had rolled up the sleeves of his work shirt and I could now see a band of black tattoos inked around his biceps. Strength markings, similar to Torrance’s.

“What in the hell…,” was all I could say before Rex lunged at me.

“I cannot let you detonate those explosives,” he said, grabbing me by the shoulders and lifting me away from the control panel. With little effort he tossed me out of the tailer and stomped after me.

I was caught be surprised and the rough landing knocked the wind out of me. I struggled to my feet and pulled out my club. “Who are you, Rex?”

He stared at me, contempt written all over his face. “Rex. You called me that because you thought I followed you around like a puppy. Rex. It means king, you know, and it is suitable for what I’ll become when a permanent path is created through the gate.”

I was flabbergasted but I was now trying to circle him, to get closer to the door of the trailer. He seemed to be aware of my goal and stepped to block my path.

“We’ve known about you and Torrance for awhile, Ross. It was quite the scandal in the Night Coven when Dame Elsbeth announced she had trained one of your world to act as a warden on this side of the Gate. It was after we found out about Torrance that we decided we needed our own person on this side of the Gate as well. I slipped through two years ago, waiting for this moment. It was I who put up the beacon, the markings on the wall.” Rex was moving slowly forward, pushing me further away from the trailer as I attempted to keep a safe distance.

He continued, enjoying his moment of betrayal, “Right now, Torrance is not only engaged in combat with two of our finest warriors, but the Baron of the Cabal himself is surely now upon him. If the Baron made it through, that only means Dame Elsbeth and her group have been destroyed or disabled. Hope for your world is lost this night.”

“Hope is never lost!” I shouted back irrationally. I had no idea what I was saying. I just had that sinking feeling that I was the last defense we had against the Cabal and I wasn’t going to be able to fulfill that function with Rex standing between the detonator button and me.

He laughed at me and stepped forward to swing his fist at me. I ducked low and swung the club out, catching him in the side, right below his ribcage. I heard the grimace and then felt his magically empowered arms come crashing down against my spine. The pain was intense and I fell to the ground. My attempt to roll away was thwarted by Rex’s boot being kicked into my abdomen.

Summoning my strength, I grabbed hold of Rex’s leg like an annoying kid brother. I held on for dear life as he attempted to kick me with his other foot. That was what I was hoping for. As he lifted his other leg, I pulled hard on the one I was holding. Rex was thrown off balance and fell to the ground with me. It was my chance to make a break for the trailer. Scrambling on all fours until I could get to my feet, I dropped my club and held my stomach, running stooped over.

Rex was right behind me. As I reached the trailer, he caught me. His fist pummeled my back, throwing me forward with my momentum. My head crashed into the steps to the security trailer. All I could see was red and blood filled my mouth. My body ignored the pain and I still tried to move forward. I had to see how Torrance was doing.

I was able to get into the trailer before Rex grabbed hold of my ankle and tried to drag me back out. I kicked hard at his hands, probably doing my damage to myself than him, but one of my kicks loosened his grip enough that I was able to slip away. I had seconds to look over the monitors.

Torrance was fighting the Baron. The spinners were on the screen knocked out or dead on the floor, I wasn’t sure which. Torrance looked hellish, blood streaked across his face, his clothing torn, and his shadowstaff no where to be seen. The Baron stood easily a foot taller than Torrance and the Baron’s hand with their unearthly long gray fingers were lashing out at Torrance like whips.

Rex had come back into the trailer and I had to make a split second decision. I hit the detonator button with my hand.

The entire site shook as the C4 charges exploded. All the camera feeds to the monitors went dead. Plumes of dust and debris shot out of windows and openings in the building. Rex grabbed me and beat my head against the console until I passed out.

The Varek construction site was abandoned as the developer disappeared. The building was taken over by squatters again and rumors of ghosts and ghouls living inside the building became popular street talk in the area.

I quit my job with Varek and now sell newspapers at a newsstand across the street from the Warren. I never saw Rex again, but I know he’s out there. I hope Torrance is okay, but I haven’t heard from him since that night. I do know that the Gate was not destroyed. The Gate can’t be destroyed. It is just a labyrinth and sometimes the walls of a labyrinth move and a new path needs to be found. If that day comes, I will be here, doing what I can to stop them, because that is what Torrance would have wanted.

Umbral Gate Part V

2004-09-27T01:14:00.000-05:00

“I noticed, from my vantage point crouched on the floor, that the stickspinners kept the sticks guarding their heads and upper body, but not their feet and ankles. Elsbeth’s goons most likely couldn’t notice this due to their proximity. I stood and sidled alongside Skirt’s foe. The sticks shifted slightly to protect the side I was on. I feigned a lunge, dropped down to my knee while delivering a brutal kick to the spinner’s foot. I was pummeled several times by the sticks: a few blows to the head and a hard blow against my ribs, shattering two of them. The sticks clattered to the ground though as the spinner stumbled from my kick. Skirt seized the opportunity and jabbed the spinner twice in the chest, pounded him in the face once and finished him with a powerful roundhouse kick that knocked him into the wall, busting the drywall and causing the spinner to collapse unconscious.

“I tried to roll out of the way to catch my breath and deal with the pain, I saw the Dame still battling the dragon. The beast had pushed its head inside the skylight and was now using its mouth to attempt to swallow Elsbeth whole. She kept it at bay with her staff, bludgeoning it in the snout and head. With deftness I’ve never seen, Elsbeth rolled backwards to avoid a lunging bite, and came to her feet. She held the staff like a spear, cocked her arm back, and hurled it at the dragon’s head as its mouth smashed into the floor. The staff hit true and penetrated the beast’s skull with a blinding flash of light. It took several frantic seconds for my vision to return to normal to see the result of the blow. Elsbeth moved away from the lifeless dragon, a black ichor oozing forth from the mortal wound. Skirt had stepped alongside Pants and together they were destroying the spinning sticks. Shard of wood flew away with each pounding blow and timed kick. The spinner, seeing he was now outnumbered backed away through the door, his protective sticks fell to the floor and he fled. The goons gave chase.

“The Dame Elsbeth walked over to me and knelt next to me as I attempted to sit up. She told me to stay down as she pulled a cloth from the inside pocket of her coat. Folded in the cloth was some sort of dried herb or something that she made me eat while she held her hands over my torso and chanted what sounded like gibberish. The pain slowly faded.”

“I must have passed out, though. The next thing I can remember was being hauled out of the Warren by two uniformed officers. I spent the night in the hospital and after I filed my report, I was given the chance to resign or being terminated for psychotic disorders. The police did a full sweep of the building and didn’t find anything that backed up my story except for the section of the floor that had caved in.”

Rex stared blankly. “And what happened between when you were with Paragon Security and now?”

Torrance smiled. “I did my own investigation which led me to understand quite a bit about the Umbral Gate and the world on the other side. The gate is a labyrinth, walk it correctly and you are transported to the other side.”

I had to interrupt. There was movement on the monitor. “We’ve got spinners!”

Torrance glanced at the monitor as he stood and stepped to the door. “Arm yourselves but stay near the trailer.”

Torrance stepped out of the trailer and it rocked as it righted itself. We watched him from the trailer door disappear into the building. Rex flipped a few switched and he appeared on a set of monitors. We followed his progress and the progress of two men who seemed to be covered in a haze on the monitor.

“What should we do?” Rex asked in anticipation.

“We sit tight. If they get through, I’ll have to take them out.”

“What do you mean? If Torrance and that Dame can’t stop them, how are you going to do it?”

On the panel that controlled the monitors, there was a small door with a lock. I reached into my shirt and pulled out a key. “The button beneath that hatch is connected to explosive charges that are set throughout the building.”

“Dear god!”

“We cannot allow them to come through.” Rex looked about nervously. “Don’t worry; the charges won’t collapse the building, only seal the exits. We are safe, relatively.”

Torrance walked carefully through the hallways. The spinners approached down a side tunnel. Torrance made a broad sweeping gesture with his arms and his hands glowed blue. As the spinners turned the corner and faced Torrance, Torrance thrust his hands forward and a stream of blue light shot out from both hands, blasting one of the spinners squarely. The spinner flew backward into the wall, but didn’t seem phased by Torrance’s attack.

The second spinner rapidly threw several knives at Torrance. Torrance reacted with extraordinary speed, dodging to the side, and then rolling forward. As he came up to his feet, a long dark staff appeared in his hands.

“There is something else coming,” Rex exclaimed pointing to one of the monitors. I took my eyes off of Torrance’s fight to look at what Rex saw. On the small thirteen inch monitor was a tall skulking man creature. He was so thin his gray skin revealed his freakish skeleton. He wore a long tattered black coat with a red poppy in the lapel. On his head, covering his long yarn like grayish black hair was a battered velvet black top hat with a satin band. Another red poppy stuck out of the black satin band. Four small metal spikes protruded from his sternum, and a chain ran from a ring in his ear to a ring to the side of his bottom lip.

The Umbral Gate, Part IV

2004-09-14T15:25:00.000-05:00

“What in fuck was that?” Rex asked, using foul language in front of me for the first time.

“Not our concern.”

“Shouldn’t we report it? Call the police?”

I turned away from the monitors and told him to sit back. “The call was made, there is very little we can do right now except stay in this trailer and keep our fingers crossed.”

“I can’t believe you are shirking your responsibility,” Rex accused me.

I shook my head; “Let me finish telling you about Torrance, it will hopefully explain everything. The Dame Elsbeth summed up the situation for Torrance. In her world, there was a cabal that uses magic and crazy ass stuff like that, which I guess isn’t too strange given the other oddities, but they are bent on creating a domain in our world to escape the rules of their society and live here like gods. Dame Elsbeth claimed that not only would it be disruptive to our world but would signal a reign of chaos and destruction in hers.”

“This is crazy!” Rex shouted. “If you aren’t going to do your job, then I will.” Rex grabbed a flashlight and an extra container of pepper spray as he moved about the trailer in a huff. The boy had a sense of purpose. Guys like him don’t stay in jobs like this very long, but this time instead of just moving on, he was putting his life on the line. I wasn’t going to let him go, but I figured I’d let him burn off some of his nervous tension first. He finally got his stuff together and reached for the handle to open the door to the trailer.

“Hold up, Rex,” I said. Rex opened the door and took a step before stopping. Rex stood in the doorway aghast. He took two steps back inside the trailer and the doorway was filled with the form of a tall man. His face was pale and he wore a full-length black leather duster. Underneath the coat you could see a purple brocade vest covering a bone white satin or silk shirt. The man’s nose was a bit pointy and the goatee on his chin was perfectly trimmed. Along his brow and on his hands were odd black tattoos. Without hesitation he stepped into the trailer. As he put his booted foot inside, the entire trailer tilted slightly. The man was not a lightweight, though he didn’t look it. His height concealed his mass.

“Rex,” I said, “this is Torrance. Torrance, this is my partner, Rex.”

Torrance looked Rex up and down before he broke his silence, “Where were you rushing off to, Rex?”

Finding his voice Rex replied, “F-fourth floor, East Wing, there was something on the monitor.”

“Weren’t you told to wait?” Torrance asked.

“I’m just doing my job,” Rex replied, emboldened.

I stepped in. “I was telling him about your first experience with the Gate. He’s young and eager, though.”

Torrance indicated the building that was in the long process of being gutted and rehabbed behind them. “Nearly six years ago, this building was a falling apart, a haven for the lost, a hunting ground for all sorts of human predators. The interior may be undergoing a significant change, but it is still the Umbral Gate linking this world to a world unlike anything you can imagine. Inside that building is not your world, you have no authority there. Looking at you, you would most likely find your way to your grave in there.”

Rex lost his voice again and stood with his mouth agape.

Torrance looked over at me and asked, “What did you see on the fourth floor?”

“We saw the girl, the Gatekeeper,” I replied.

“How much did you tell Rex?”

“I told him everything up to Dame Elsbeth telling you about the cabal.”

Torrance looked back at Rex and told him to take a seat. “I want you to know what you may be facing tonight. You aren’t expected to do anything except keep yourself safe, which means no reckless charging into an area you were told to stay out of. Got it?”

Rex nodded.

“Good. When Dame Elsbeth of the Night Coven had me in the Chamber she told me about the cabal. The cabal is akin to the anarchist movement in our world, rebelling against the authority of the Night Coven. The cabal doesn’t care about the effect their actions may have on the world around them so long as they are freed from the dictates of the Lords and Dames of the Night Coven. To them, the Umbral Gate represents a chance to work their craft and live their lives without any authority. In our world, they wouldn’t have to bow to anyone. Their powers would be greater than anything we could imagine.”

Torrance looked around the small trailer and grabbed a chair to sit in so he didn’t have to stoop. He continued, “As the Dame told me this, there was an almost deafening noise from above. She and I looked up. Straddling the skylight was a giant winged reptilian creature – a dragon.”

Rex looked over at me as if I was suddenly going to shout “April Fools” but that wasn’t the case. I just nodded my head, affirming the truth of Torrance’s story.

“The dragon’s wings flapped and the wind nearly bowled me out of my chair. The Dame reacted quickly, reaching behind her and pulling out a staff that couldn’t have been there before. It just seemed to emerge from thin air. I rolled off the chair towards the wall when I saw her two goons, one I called Skirt the other Pants facing off against the two men I had originally spotted in the alleyway. They were members of the cabal. Something was blurring around them, though. At first I thought they had nanchaku or some other oriental weapon, but then I noticed their hands weren’t moving. There were six-inch wooden sticks spinning in a complex pattern around them. As they walked, the sticks continued to move relative to them.

“I crawled to the wall and glanced at the Dame fighting the dragon. She was fending off its massive clawed foot with her staff. Each time she struck it, a flash of white light burst forth from the staff.

“Pants lunged at one of the stickspinners, laying out a blistering attack at an incredible speed. His fists kept striking the spinning sticks, each blow was blocked by the twirling weapons. Skirt guy faced off with his opponent with the same effect. Though both of the Dame’s goons were relentless in their attacks, they were held at a standstill.

“I felt lost in the in that twisted other-worldly battle. For crying out loud, there was a dragon – a large greenish reptile from a god damned fairy tale on the roof above me attacking a woman with just a staff. How she was keeping it at bay was beyond me. Honestly, in my opinion at that time, both sides represented an equal threat to my survival, but the exit was blocked by the stickspinners and seeing that I had no desire to remain and see who would win out, the dragon or the Dame, I decided I needed to clear a path to the door.”

Torrance checked his watch and turned to me, “Which one is the fourth floor, East Wing monitor?”

I tapped one of the screens, “This one.”

“Keep a close eye on it," he commanded.

The Umbral Gate, Part III

2004-09-13T14:56:00.000-05:00

Author's Note: 2 points to anyone who spots the Goth joke.

“Torrance told me that if he had fully realized what she meant, he would have turned around and walked out. But to him, in full cop mode, it sounded like an idle threat made by rebellious teens who thought they had created a society apart from the rest of the world. He charged up the stairs and burst through the stairwell door into an upper hallway that smelled of an old fire. The walls were badly scorched and the linoleum tiles had melted away in a large circular section exposing the subflooring.

“Not knowing how stable the section of the floor was, he tried his best to circumvent it by cozying up to the wall and moving as if he were on a very narrow ledge. Three-quarters of the way across, the subflooring started to crumble under his feet next to the wall. A large section collapsed beneath him, giving him just a split second to jump for the non-burned area of the floor. Another section under his legs gave way and Torrance found himself dangling nearly 15 feet above the floor below, where several people stared up in bewilderment before going about their lives again. I guess that was just the way of life in the Warren, sometimes the ceiling fell in, you just dust yourself off and move on. Luckily for Torrance, his upper body was already firmly in place and he was able to kick his leg up and roll away from the hole.

“Unluckily for Torrance, he found himself staring at three pairs of black boots. The pair in the middle had a four-inch heel, were shiny enough he could almost see himself in them, and went all the way up the most beautiful pair of legs he could ever possibly imagine seeing in his life. She wore a matching vinyl outfit that looked like a pair of shorts and a tight blouse that exposed her cleavage. The coat she wore buttoned under her breasts, enhancing them even further and the tail of the coat nearly touched the floor. Her hair was long and black, with the sections framing her face colored an intense red. Which matched her equally red lips.

“Torrance started to stand muttering to the woman, ‘Nice boots.’ She smirked and Torrance became aware of the two frail looking creatures flanking her. Both were tall, easily six feet, but thin as rails. The one of the right wore a long black skirt that pooled around his feet and a mesh shirt. His hair was long and dark, and he wore sunglasses. There were odd tattoos similar to the eyeless girl downstairs tattooed on his arms. The one of the left wore shiny black pants, no shirt covered his hairless chest but he did wear a black velvet smoking jacket trimmed in blue. His hair was also long and pitch black, pulled into a ponytail. Torrance called them her goons. Both stooped and took him by the arms, and heaved him upward with little effort. He has assumed, due to their appearance, these two were the blow away in a stiff breeze types. He had assumed heroin or some other wasting drug. Their visage hid their strength well.

“The woman commanded them to bring him to the Chamber, which turned out to just be a large room on the top floor. Torrance was too stunned from his near fall that he wasn’t sure what was going on. He let the two goons lead him for a few seconds before planting his feet and attempting to break away. He caught them by surprise and was able to pull away. He drew his pistol and aimed it at them. ‘Hold it right there!’ he commanded to them, ‘No one is taking me anywere.’

“The woman stared at him impatiently and issued another command, ‘Get him.’

‘I’ll shoot!’

The two goons didn’t seem phased by his threat and closed in on him. Torrance pulled the trigger on the gun, once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. The pistol just clicked. Skirt grabbed the gun from his hand and tossed it to the side while Pants landed a punch into Torrance’s stomach, causing him to bend over in pain. Another blow to his back knocked him to his knees. Once again the goons picked up him by the arms and this time dragged him through the hallway, up two flights of stairs and into a large room. Torrance got dumped into a wooden chair and the woman took a seat in a chair facing him. The two goons flanked her once more.

“The room once had a skylight that ran the full length of the room. The glass had long since been smashed out. Torrance noticed the sky was unusual, the closest he had ever seen anything like it was the aurora borealis with intense wavering colors. It filled the sky and was so bright no stars could be seen. He knew nothing like that was going on when he entered the building. At that moment, he did feel like he was in another world.

“The woman asked him why he was there and he responded by asking who she was. He still had the residual confidence that his back up was on the way. She answered his question with a lot of stuff he didn’t understand. He understood the language, but none of the words made sense in the way she was using them. Her name was Dame Elsbeth of the Night Coven, guardian of the Umbral Gate. Everything she said boiled down to a few nuts and bolts. She was charged with the task to watch the Umbral Gate – the Warren, which for some reason was a link between her world and ours. Within the building the two worlds mingled casually, but it was her sworn duty to prevent our world from going into hers and her world from coming into ours. She was keenly interested in how Torrance had entered her world.

“Torrance described all the events that led up to that moment. After he mentioned the graffiti, Dame Elsbeth became visibly disturbed. She had Torrance describe exactly what he had seen. When he did all she said was, ‘they are attempting to circumvent the gate.’”

Rex interrupted me and pointed at the monitors. They had all gone to static. I reached over and toggled a few switched, turning the monitors off and on. They flickered back to their black and white images of various locations in the development site. Rex and I both cycled through the different views before stopping at one that had a lone dark figure standing in the hallway.

“That’s the fourth floor, East wing,” Rex said.

I didn’t say anything. There seemed to be a shadow enveloping the figure and I couldn’t even judge the size of the person. Whoever it was stepped forward and raised it’s face to the camera. As the face lifted, more light fell on it and both Rex and I gasped. It was a young girl with empty eye sockets. The screen flashed as it became inundated with light. As the light faded, the girl was gone.

The Umbral Gate Part II

2004-09-13T13:17:00.000-05:00

“He said his regular calls were to oust loitering teens from coffee shops, take vandalism reports, and bust underage drinking, old guys who got off flashing Goth girls, and occasional possession of illegal substance kind of stuff. He said the only real gang activity was drugs, supplying the area’s insatiable demand for coke, x, and pot. This just meant that he kept a look out for possible drug activity to bust gangbangers, which earned him some attention down at the station. A cop needed a few big busts to get better assignments. So when he noticed some suspicious activity in an alley one night, he radioed in his location and set off investigating it.

“The alley was behind a building he said the police called the Warren. Abandoned for years, the ownership was constantly in question; it was filled with homeless kids and squatters. It was a different world inside. As Torrance headed down the alley, the two figures that caught his attention spotted him and bolted, climbing over the cyclone fence that blocked an entrance to the Warren and over a makeshift wooden barricade, disappearing inside. The wall where they had been standing had been tagged.”

Rex interrupted. “Like our wall?”

“I don’t know if it was like our wall, but Torrance said it was some pretty crazy graffiti, like nothing he had ever seen. He assumed it was a new gang moving in on the territory. He radioed in his location and told the dispatch that he was going inside the Warren after two suspicious male youths.”

I pulled out my brown paper lunch bag and pulled out a tomato. Being a bachelor meant not being picky about what you ate, and all I had in my fridge was three beers, this tomato, a container of potato salad, which scared me because I can’t recall the last time I bought potato salad, and a package of lunchmeat. I began eating the tomato and wiping juice off my chin.

“Inside the Warren was a different world. Torrance had said he had only heard stories about cops who went in, about how there are people everywhere, sleeping on top of conduits, in holes in the walls, and how the entire place seemed to be teeming with life that you can’t see. At night, by himself, Torrance was scared shitless, but his cop instincts told him to keep a cool and calm exterior. He moved through the halls quickly, his flashlight guiding him. He stepped over bags of clothes taken from salvation army drop boxes, kicked empty bottles of vodka and absinthe out of the way, and kept a close eye on the shadows.

“He could sense being watched, though he couldn’t see anyone. He realized that most likely the two men he was chasing had a much better knowledge of the layout of the Warren than he did. He knew he would have to proceed cautiously in case of an ambush.

“As he crept through the halls, he noticed a young girl slumped against the wall. Her head was pressed to her knees. He shined his light on her and asked if she had seen anyone come by in the past few minutes. She didn’t respond to him so he stepped closer and repeated himself. He was right up next to her, leaning over slightly, the flashlight held steady on her. Torrance began to repeat his question. The girl’s head snapped up. Torrance, already nervous due to being in the Warren by himself, startled and dropped the flashlight; which bounced and rolled into the trash. The bulb shattered from the impact, though it was supposed to be immune from such simple bumps and knocks.”

I paused. I could feel my heartbeat racing. I still remember Torrance describing all of this to me in such vivid detail. I wiped my mouth with a paper towel I was using as a napkin. Rex seemed enthralled, waiting for the next part.

“Her eyes,” I continued, “were just empty sockets. The skin of her face was as white as porcelain, as white as this piece of copy paper. Tattooed all around her eye sockets were intricate black markings – many looked like the graffiti Torrance had seen in the alley.

“She spoke to him in a raspy voice, a voice that sounded much older than the body it came from. ‘You don’t belong here,’ she said to him. ‘You should leave, you are in danger.’

“Torrance shuddered at the sound of her voice and the sight of her, though he couldn’t really see her now without his flashlight, but the brief moment he saw her face was burned into his mind. He was deeply affected by this girl, but he wasn’t going to let her know he was freaked out. In his most authoritative ‘move on, nothing to see here’ cop voice he asked if anyone had been by in the past few minutes. She answered in her raspy voice, ‘the ones you seek went up the stairs, but you won’t find them, they are not of your world and you have no authority in theirs.’”

The Umbral Gate, Part I

2004-09-10T15:59:00.000-05:00

Author's Note: This text has been edited from when it was first posted to add necessary elements to make the ending more solid. I guess this is why I should only post finished works, but I really wanted to get parts of this story up for comment. And thank all of you who do leave comments. They do mean a lot to me.

Rex was a rookie and his name wasn’t really Rex, I just called him that. His actual name was Aden. Aden. What type of name is that? Anyway, he was my partner assigned to me as we worked construction security for Varek construction. His voice cackled over the radio, “Mr. Nolen? This is Aden, over.”

I grabbed the radio from my belt, “Call me Ross, Rex, what’s up? Over.”

“Well, sir, it looks like vandals broke in, spray painted all sorts of shit, uh, stuff all over one of the walls down here. I saw one of them head up some stairs. Please advise. Over.”

I ground me teeth a bit. “I’ll be right down. Stay put. Over and out.”

It didn’t take me long to leave the little trailer set up for security to get to Rex’s position. Sure enough, one wall had been tagged. “We’ll do a write up,” I said.

“A write up, shouldn’t we go after that guy?” Rex asked, antsy for his first real confrontation.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

I walked back to the trailer following me like the dog I imagined him being when I decided his name should be Rex. We got back inside the trailer, I checked the closed circuit TV monitors for any activity and then told Rex to sit. I had to make a phone call and it wasn’t to the police or Varek, it was a special number given to me by the owner of the building. The voice mail picked up and all I had to say was, “The gate had been opened.”

I turned to Rex. “I’m going to tell you a story, told to me awhile ago by one of my partners.

“I’ve had a lot of partners in the six years I’ve worked for Paragon Security. You are like my thirteenth I think. Some of them were really unique. Like Jersey Joe. Did you ever hear about Jersey Joe?”

Aden indicated he hadn’t.

“Well, his name really wasn’t Jersey Joe, I just called him that because he had what I think was a New Jersey accent and drank a lot of coffee. I mean he drank it like it was brewed crack or something. He would go on long rants about his totally psychotic family. I swear to god most of the urban legends you hear originated with Jersey Joe’s family.

“His brother lost a leg while changing a tire because his brother used a crowbar lever to lift the car and a sandbag to hold it down. As he sat, one leg sprawled under the car he didn’t notice the sandbag slipping off the end of the crowbar. WHAM! The bag slipped off, the car came crashing down on his leg.” Rex grimaced as I slammed my hand down on the desk.

“See, the way Jersey Joe told it, his brother probably could have kept the leg if the ambulance had been called sooner, but the brother’s wife yelled at him for being a dumbass for a good thirty minutes. I guess each person handles stress differently.”

Rex nodded, still not understanding what I was talking about. That’s okay; I don’t like to get right to the point regarding things like this.

“Of all my partners, I enjoyed and feared working with Torrance the most. Torrance was kind of creepy because he always had a distant far away look about him like he was looking out over the horizon. I also doubt he bathed regularly and I am certain the security uniform was the only clothing he owned. Late into the shifts, he would tell the most spellbinding stories you can imagine. During all this time, even though his stories were way out there, I never doubted him for a moment. Torrance just wasn’t the kind of guy you openly doubted anyway. He had that odd intensity, what’s it called… gravitas about him that just made you believe what he was saying.

“The two of us starting working together at Crossgate Mall. Mall security was the best, just walk around and check doors to make sure they were locked. I loved it. It also provided ample opportunity to talk, though Torrance wasn’t talkative at first. I broke the silence by asking how he became a security guard. He looked at me like I asked if I could dig up his mother’s grave and use her ribcage as a sousaphone…”

“You mean xylophone,” Rex interrupted.

“Yeah, whatever, as a musical instrument. See, all types end up in this job. There are guys like you who get out of high school and are drifting until they fall into something better like marrying some girl who’d dad owns a business or something. Then there are guys like me who couldn’t afford college, took a job to help pay, end up getting some girl pregnant, get stuck in the job, get a divorce, have child support payments, and end up dead from alcohol poisoning at the age of 56. Then there are guys like Torrance who will never fit any sort of mold. His story was unique.” I had to stop a second and do a quick run through on all the monitors. If the kid saw someone go up the stairs, there was a chance I might be able to spot them on the monitors. Getting a visual would help me understand exactly what we were up against.

“Anyway, he told me I wouldn’t believe him if he told me. I shrugged. I didn’t believe Jersey Joe’s sister was stupid enough to mistake a rat for a Chihuahua but the picture he had proved me wrong. The point being there is a lot of stuff in this world that is hard to believe – hard to believe does not mean it isn’t true.

“Torrance had only said that as a warm up though because I didn’t have to press him to get him to start telling me. The way he picked through his words was like this was the first time he ever spoken about it.

“He told me he used to be a beat cop in the city. One of those policemen who walked instead of driving around in his patrol car. Paragon had a lot of cops, active cops, retired cops, and ‘other’ cops. The other cops were the biggest problems. They were usually bad cops given the option to leave with benefits or be fired. Cops protecting the brotherhood. These others always had something to prove. Always trying to be tougher, roughing up the people we have to chase away, that kind of thing.

“Torrance walked the area called Carfax Abbey.”

Rex stared blankly at me. Probably the same look I gave Torrance after hearing that.

“Yeah, I didn’t know what it was either. He said it was the section of the city where all the Goths hung out. There were clubs, coffee shops, new age bookstores, and that type of crap in a few blocks radius. In the novel Dracula, Carfax Abbey is the place in London Dracula buys.

Winter Lake

2004-09-01T11:31:00.000-05:00

Winters in Montana were never mild when I was growing up there. The snow always threatened to bury the house, or at least cover the windows on one side of the house. One of my earliest memories of winter in Montana was that of a small Franklin stove. God bless Benjamin Franklin for his invention. Actually, to be technical, God bless David R. Rittenhouse who took Franklin’s flawed design of a freestanding cast-iron stove and made it work. Good ol’ Ben had originally designed his stove so the smoke would exit from the bottom, failing to realize that smoke rises and fire needs oxygen. His design did produce a stove that radiated a lot of heat, but wouldn’t stay lit for extended periods of time. Rittenhouse redesigned the stove with a pipe on top.

I loved that stove. I would awaken in the cold morning well before the sun broke over the mountains to the east and hover near the stove. It was on these mornings I would cherish the cinnamon toast and hot chocolate my mom would make for me. My dad would have already left for work. Often his would be the first tire tracks out on the long dirt road that lead to the main paved road.

As I grew up, winter was more than just cold and snow. The hill that led down to the lake became an ultimate sledding course. The lake itself would freeze over with ice sometimes two feet thick and would become the largest ice skating rink I have ever known. I loved ice-skating on that lake. At night, the frozen lake would speak and sing. The ice was always under some form of stress and that stress would result in cracks erupting. Each crack was a voice and sometimes the voices gathered into choirs. As spring approached, the ice would get more talkative. On a good day I would skate from my house, to Kim’s Marina, into Chinaman’s Campground, over to Yacht Basin, around Cemetery Island, back to home. That would take me about three hours. I would do this alone, which wasn’t without risk.

I never fully realized the risks involved until that one winter when I was skating along and hit thin ice and fell in. I sank with the weight of the skates on my feet and struggled to get my arms on the ice, but the ice kept breaking. Turning towards shore, I kept breaking the ice until my feet touched bottom and then continued moving towards land. I don’t have a recollection of being cold, I think fear and adrenaline kept me warm enough. As soon as I hit the beach, I ran the best I could with my skates on towards the house. I was luckily over an area that was called ‘the point’ which was a stretch of beach on the north side of Magpie Bay, which wasn’t too far from home. The run home was cold, that I do recall keenly. My fingers and toes were numb and I was shivering like mad. The frostbite was minor, but to this day, a good blast from the air conditioner will make my ears, fingers, and toes burn and ache.

I understood from that moment on, the true treachery of that area of the lake. It didn’t take much warmth in that are for that section of the ice to melt away when the rest of the lake was still several inches thick. Unfortunately, not enough people knew this. One winter’s night when I was in high school, I was getting a hair cut from my mom. I noticed a light flashing from the lake. On closer inspection, it was coming from a man stranded out there. I grabbed an orange water float that was meant to be pulled behind a boat and ran out to the point to help guide the man ashore. He had been following the tracks of his father’s homemade snowmobile when he got to this section. The ice was cracking around him and he was unsure of where to move to get back to safety. Luckily he had been on foot and was able to hear the sounds and sense the fragility of the ice. His father who had been out on the snowmobile much earlier in the day, didn’t have that notice and plunged through the thin ice. His father had fallen into the iced over lake a dozen yards away from where I fell in. I only had to move several feet to find footing, no one knows what conditions under which that man was struggled.

As the lake thawed with the approach of spring, the ice would melt away from the shore, leaving a giant tantalizing raft of ice floating out in the center. The air would be warm, the ground was wet instead of frozen and talk among my brothers and sisters would turn from winter things to who would be the first in the lake. If there were any Rites of Childhood for me, attempting to be first in the lake had to be one of the most cherished. How hard could it be, in March and sometimes April, when the lake was shedding it’s icy crust, to take a dip. The water was crystal clear and so tempting. The lake was cold, but feeling it with your hand, you couldn’t see how it was so cold as to prevent you from taking that quick dip and thus earning the title First In The Lake.

Dressed in bathing suits a few would line up and make their attempts. Some would get to their knees, few would get to their waists, and I dare say that I have no recollection of anyone going in all the way. As the ice disappeared completely and the sun was out longer, eventually someone would get in, but by that time the boaters were already on the lake and the title was a bit more meaningless because summer was around the corner.

Unfettering

2004-08-19T12:19:00.000-05:00

He dangled, in midair, his right arm stretched skyward.

Pain burned through his hand, down his outstretched arm and into his bare torso. Nothing was actually visibly wrapped around his wrist, but he felt it. Whatever it was obviously suspended him, within a darkened void. No walls, no floor, no ceiling around him at all. Only a faint bit of light from far below him gave any indication that there was anything else around at all.

He struggled against the pain for conscious thought.

‘What is my name? Fucking pain! No. Nothing like that.’

Tears left him long ago. Tears don’t heal this kind of pain. He felt his heartbeat in his wrist, each beat causing a jolt of pain.

‘I must be a tortured hero. I must have delivered fire unto humanity in defiance of the gods.’

Once in a while a cold draft would blow pass him, sending a shiver through his naked, dependent body. A particularly strong wind would start him swaying, increasing the pain that his body could never quite adapt or adjust itself to. Each moment was like experiencing the excruciating pain for the first time. The muscles, ligaments, and tendons that held his arm and should together were slowly pulling apart. His shoulder would soon become dislocated.

‘Jacob. No. That’s my dad’s name. Thomas begets John. John begets Jacob. Jacob begets Mark. Mark. My name is Mark.’

Eternal pain. How long has it been?

Mark winced and breathed deeply which caused a slow spin. With his head hanging listlessly, he forced his eyes open, like he had done before, to see what he could see. A dark room, a void. Mark rolled his head to the side to look at his wrist. He squinted and though he could see the tether. A forged iron chain, each link covered in thorns, a hellish rose stem, twisted into binding links. The thorns pierced his flesh. In the dim light from below, Mark could make out dried blood all down his forearm.

‘How did I get here? What hell is this? What god have I offended? Forgive me my daily trespasses… my hourly trespasses… forgive my ignorance and my malice… if I had known this would be my punishment I would never have committed whatever sin it is I did that warranted this punishment.’

Mark thought of a scene he had read in the book Dune a thousand years ago, in the beginning of time, in the beginning of the pain. A young man was tested for his humanity by putting his hand in a box that caused pain. Dune. Paul. The test was to see if Paul would pull his hand from the box or if he would withstand the pain. Only a human would endure the pain. An animal would flee it.

Mark bowed his head trying to see through the darkness below him, trying to see what caused the dim light to shine. He could see nothing. With his remaining energy, he twisted his arm violently. The pain paralyzed his ability to scream, but he kept twisting his arm. Gashes appeared around his wrist, blood gently flowed. Mark struggled against his bond. He felt his flesh shred, but he didn’t stop his frantic thrashing. Mark looked like a fish caught on a hook, being lifted from the safety of the water.

He was an animal, not a human. The pain must have an end. A coyote would chew its own leg off to escape a trap. Isn’t that better? Escape the pain. Does it take courage to inflict a greater amount of pain upon yourself in hopes of ending all pain?

Mark didn’t care anymore. The chain ground against his bones now. He feared the fall, the descent into the darkness, the descent towards that dim light. The light of hope, or the light of a hell worse than this one.

‘Put a frog in boiling water and the frog jumps out. Put the same frog in a pot of water over low heat and it will remain there until it is cooked to death.’

Mark hoisted himself up, trying to grab hold of the chain with his left hand. His hand only touched air where the chain should have been. Tired from his efforts and overwhelmed by the pain, Mark slipped from consciousness.

All around Mark’s dependent body, drafts of air and winds whispered to him.

‘Don’t fight it, Mark,’ whooshed the winds.

‘The pain of hanging here isn’t so bad.’

‘Why trade a known for an unknown? The pain of hanging could be much better than the pain of falling, unsupported, into the void.’

‘Once you fall, you cannot return.’

‘Some actions cannot be undone.’

Mark didn’t know how long he had been unconscious. Time was meaningless in the void. When he finally woke, he noticed the skin of his arm had started to heal over the chain. He begged for death. Why wouldn’t he die from blood loss at least?

Without hesitation, he began in earnest to free himself. The sharp chain worked its way up his hand, peeling the skin along the way. Mark lifted himself up and let himself drop. Each drop peeled more skin. Each drop sent shockwaves of pain through his entire body. Each drop was closer to being free, closer to death, salvation, or damnation.

Another drop and the chain sliced through the bone of his thumb, which now tumbled into the darkness. Mark could feel the chain slipping up along his hand without his help. He was afraid now of the fall. He curled his fingers to catch the loop and to hold on tightly. Who was he to question the will of the gods?

There was no strength left in his hand and his fingers couldn’t hold onto the chain. Mark tumbled into the void. There was no scream.

He fell in the void.

The Scott Dialogues: Aesthetics Part I - Is Art Beautiful?

2004-08-18T10:51:00.000-05:00

The following is a transcript of a conversation recorded October 8, 2002 at a diner on Clark Street in Chicago. The person who made the recording prefers to remain nameless as his or her actions may actually be deemed criminal. What you are about to read is in fact one of the many conversations involving an enigmatic individual called Scott, the entire collection being called ‘The Scott Dialogues”.

When ever possible, the person’s real name, if known through the conversation is used. Otherwise a fictitious name has been assigned to the person’s voice for sake of clarity.

Michael: I was at the North Halsted Market Days and there was this guy there selling painted sea shells with tea light candles in them. He was calling his creations art and billed himself as an artist. I know art and that wasn’t art, that was crap, which makes him a crapist at best.

Megan: Crapist? Is that your latest attempt at being clever? Michael, just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it isn’t art.

Michael: Jesus, Megan, give me a fucking break. Why do you always question everything I say. I’m just commenting on this guy’s seashell candles.

Megan: Maybe if you weren’t such a clueless opinionated asshole I would have less reason to doubt what you say.

Michael: You get off on being a bitch.

Scott: It looks like I stumbled into another Michael-Megan fight. What is it over this time? Some person whom you don’t really care about and how much he weighs? Or is regarding the year Reagan was shot? What miserable assertion has been put forth that has created such ire and animosity?

Michael: Very funny, Scott. I was just telling Megan about this guy at a street fair who was selling crappy candles and calling it art.

Scott: It isn’t art? Out of curiosity and boredom, just how do you define art?

Megan: Yeah, how do you define it? This should be good, Scott against Michael.

Michael: I’m sure you’ll love it. What is art? Art is something that takes skill to create. Those seashell candles didn’t take any skill or creativity for that matter.

Scott: Art is, correct me if I am misstating your definition, something that requires skill and creativity?

Michael: Exactly!

Scott: Okay, that may be a viable definition. Let’s analyze it a bit.

Megan: No it isn’t. That isn’t what art is at all.

Scott: What do you think it is?

Megan: Art is beautiful. It comes from the soul and it makes you feel something or reflect on life in some meaningful way.

Scott: Quite the dilemma. Those are not necessarily mutually exclusive definitions.

Michael: Those seashells weren’t beautiful and the only thing it made me reflect on was who in hell would pay five bucks for one of these crappy candles.

Megan: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Scott: Does that mean Art is in the eye of the beholder as well?

Megan: I guess.

Scott: Then doesn’t that mean there isn’t an objective criterion for art? So when Michael says something isn’t art he is correct, by your definition.

Michael: Hah!

Megan: No. Well, maybe.

Scott: So the first question that needs to be resolved is can we define art objectively?

Michael: No. It is as you said; it is up to the viewer.

Scott: I never said that, I was just interpreting what Megan said.

Megan: It seems reasonable. If we agree beauty has something to do with art and beauty is subjective, than an element of art must be subjective.

Scott: Then we have to also ask; is beauty truly subjective?

Megan: Of course it is.

Scott: Really? Is it possible that everything has an intrinsic beauty and certain people are better skilled at seeing it than others?

Michael: That is ridiculous. Are you saying that a crushed bug on a car windshield is beautiful? You are sick.

Scott: Let’s run with my assumption for a second and use your gross example. What could be beautiful about it?

Michael: Nothing.

Megan: One less bug in the world, that’s beautiful.

Scott: Talk to me in artistic terms. Could there be a pleasant color scheme in the squashed bug guts? Think of it not as a squashed bug but as a painting, or a sculpture. Maybe even as just a shape. Can you honestly say that there isn’t some perspective that could be taken which won’t reveal something beautiful?

Megan: This is sort of like being attracted to someone who isn’t physically beautiful because you find his mind and heart beautiful. When you look at the right angle, you can find the beauty inside everything.

Scott: That is essentially what I am saying. Sometimes you may have to find a very specific angle to look at something to see the beauty, but if we believe that everything is beautiful, than we will find it.

Michael: I don’t understand why everything has to be beautiful. Why can’t things be ugly?

Scott: That is the corollary. If everything is beautiful if looked at from certain perspectives, everything is ugly as well.

Megan: Dang, that’s kind of depressing.

Scott: It isn’t depressing or uplifting, it just is. Don’t let emotional attachment to things like beauty and non-beauty cloud your thinking. What we have established is beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not because beauty is subjective but because some eyes can see the beauty that exists in certain things while other eyes lack the proper perspective to see it.

Michael: Isn’t this a cop out? Everything is beautiful; everything is ugly. That frees us from having to make distinctions or worry about comparisons.

Scott: No, it doesn’t. It just means we have to define how we are judging beauty before we make our pronouncement. For example, the beauty of a swimsuit model does not compare to the beauty of a balanced mathematic equation, but both are beautiful. The beauty of Sandra Bullock does not compare to the beauty of Hamlet. We don’t think twice about considering these things beautiful but in our minds we know we are applying different perspectives to these things to see their beauty. This is why beauty pageants set up different segments to judge beauty: poise, talent, swimsuit, and formal wear. They very well could create a different perspective, like complexion, bust size, teeth color, and disease resistance.

Megan: You’re odd.

Scott: But it is the truth. And that is what we are trying to sort out. The truth about Art. If Art is beautiful, we have determined that everything is beautiful, so if someone is squashing bugs between glass and calling it art, we know that it is at least beautiful.

Parable of Sam

2004-08-10T13:26:00.000-05:00

Belief creates reality. Argue all you want, pick all the nits you want, it is a fact. If you don’t believe in the fact, well, you are just trying to be difficult and are missing the point. That’s perfectly fine by me, I have nothing to gain by relating the following story to you, but you may walk away with a bit more understanding of what this world is all about. At the very least you may have a moment of entertainment and be able to laugh about that old man who sat on the park bench and told you an outrageous tale of Gods and Heroes in America.

Pardon me if I make an assumption, but you look to be like a standard American Christian. I know, I know, you don’t go to church; you don’t even know what denomination your Mother was when you were growing up. You have friends who are Catholic, but you only know that because on Ash Wednesday they have a gray smudge on their foreheads. One of your friends is a devout atheist and goes purple in the face anytime anyone bases a moral decision on the Ten Commandments or Sermon on the Mount. We all know those types. And lest I forget, you also have that ex-lover who was into banging drums, burning incense, in an attempt to be a Druidic-Wiccan Pagan New Age Shaman Magician, or something. All you really cared about was the fact the sex was good.

If anyone asks you though, you say you are a Christian. It is the way you distinguish yourself from Muslims and that couple that run the magazine stand down the street who may or may not be Hindu, but you aren’t sure because you don’t really care. Ganesha to you sounds like something you eat with hummus. You are secure in your beliefs, so long as no one forces you to defend them. That’s just fine, this is America, you are allowed to believe whatever the hell you want. Remember what I said, though, belief creates reality.

The story I’m going to tell you is about how American belief created new gods. I can see the confusion on your face already. New gods? How can there be new gods if there is only one True God? Just sit down and learn something, won’t you? Gods derive their power from the belief people put in them and to think any one of them is Truer than the next is sheer folly. Your god today has no more or less meaning than the god of the Neanderthals who marched across Western Europe in the Ice Age.

So the story starts with a fellow named Sam. Sam was a respectable man, mature yet not a curmudgeon like myself. He stood tall and had a terrific work ethic. Up before sunrise and wouldn’t get into bed until all the cows were accounted for, all the gates closed, and all the tools put away. Sam was a farmer, a carpenter, a poet, an engineer, and an explorer. As time passed Sam sometimes was forced to pick up a gun and become a soldier, but he did it because he had to, but he didn’t like it. Sam was that kind of guy; he always did what he had to do. Sometimes a fire would have to be lit under his ass, but when he started something he finished it.

Somewhere along the line, Sam started seeing a new guy around who went by the name Bill. Bill wasn’t a bad guy, didn’t seem to work as hard as Sam and over time seemed to become more important around these parts than Sam. Sam was fascinated by Bill and even started referring to him as the All Mighty. Sam seemed to find less reason to work and more reason to follow Bill. It is an odd thing when a god begins worshipping another god, but that is exactly what happened with Sam.

Understand, this really isn’t Sam’s doing. Sam was a product of the belief of the American people. Sam, was the patron god of America, an ethereal representation of what this land was about. Sam had two friends, two beautiful women named Liberty and Justice, but Sam was lured away by the temptress Media. Media had this ability to affect the beliefs of the people and to a god who is controlled by the beliefs of the people, this is a most tempting power. Sam took to Media like she was his lover since the beginning of time. Liberty and Justice were after thoughts. First Media got what she wanted, and if anything was left over Liberty and Justice would get their share. Bill didn’t care one way or another. That was probably what intrigued Sam the most about Bill. Bill could have his way with Liberty, Justice, and Media. There wasn’t anything that could oppose Bill. And Bill had no sense of morality about it.

See, my friend, these are the gods that are in the American pantheon right now. We have the venerable elder god, Sam. A father figure, no one could argue with that. Liberty and Justice, both are maternal, protecting types, though they are at odds with each other at times, quarrelling over what is more important. Bill, the Almighty Dollar, is a trickster god, caring only about self-aggrandizement. There is nothing inherently evil about Bill, but Bill doesn’t care if people do evil in their pursuit of him. Media started off as a naïve woman, a workhorse delivering news and information to the people, until a few found a way to corrupt her, turn her into a prostitute. She became a Siren, luring the unsuspected to her altars, asking them to sacrifice to her and Bill. Unlike Sam, Liberty and Justice, she doesn’t care about America as a concept, only as a means to a greater end, her own power. I would be wrong to omit that Sam has a dark side, a villainous side that rarely is seen but needs to be mentioned. Sam, upright citizen of the world, delves into the dark arts often enough to have a corrupted soul. Part of this was due to his obsession with Bill, but it is mostly due to his desire to set upon the world a certain sense of order.

Look about you right now and you can see the dark side of Sam. The Sam who completely ignores Liberty and Justice. The Sam who willingly sacrifices Liberty out of fear. The Sam who puts a cloak upon Justice out of fear. The Sam driven in a monomaniacal rampage out of fear. Sam does this in hopes of creating a new god, Security. Many have tried to build and maintain enough Belief in Security as to allow him to come forth, shield in hand, as a Cavalier of the Land, protecting all. Security often comes forth on feet of clay, though and cannot be sustained long enough to do any real good. The sacrifices made in attempt of creating the belief in security stay with us for a long time, unfortunately.

That is your fear that is driving Sam to be like this. It is your fear that encourages Sam to torture people in hopes of birthing Security into America. It is your insistence that Media isn’t a lying wench that allows you to believe the other lies in your life. Stand against your fear and believe in the Sam who was the farmer, the Sam who was a worker, the Sam who was an engineer and explorer, believe in the Sam who cared for the world, not about Bill. Believe in the Sam who had the strength to carve out a nation from wilderness, who had the wisdom to bring Liberty and Justice to all. Sam knew, way back then when this nation was crowning from the birth canal that the only real protection comes from these two fine ladies. Sam knew they would be at odds with each other at times and the country would swing back and forth between Liberty and Justice, but that was fine because Sam didn’t know which one was more important. No one does. So it is right to allow them to fight it out between themselves, because deep down Liberty respects Justice and would never harm her and Justice adores Liberty and protects her whenever possible.

Get off my bench, now, and go do something that makes Sam snap out of his dark mood. Do something that empowers Liberty and Justice so they can help Sam come back to his senses. And if you still don’t believe that belief creates reality, then to hell with you, because it does and your belief that America should be afraid and America should ignore Liberty and Justice is only hurting Sam. And when Sam hurts, the world hurts.

Little-Known Facts About Giants

2004-08-10T12:15:00.000-05:00

There are many little-known facts about giants. Did you know that giants never stop growing? Giants came into this world slightly larger than a normal child but where a normal child stops growing, the giant continues to grow. When the earth was created so were all the giants and since giants are immortal they are still alive today.

Oh yes, that is another one of those little-known facts. We know the stories of how some giants were killed. Goliath was felled by David. A fairy tale once told often to children, now nearly forgotten tells the story of a giant who had a magic harp and a goose that laid golden eggs and how one day a fellow named Jack climbed a beanstalk to this giant’s castle and stole these items. The giant chased Jack, but Jack cut the beanstalk and the giant came crashing to the earth, dying from the impact. Immortality guarantees a long life, if death can be avoided.

What of those other giants who did avoid death? Where are they now?

Since a giant never stops growing, so long as the giant continues to eat – was that mentioned before? Eating. A giant must eat to continue to grow and you don’t want to be around when a giant needs a meal. Once, one of the older and more giant of the giants sat down for a meal and a drink. Entire lakes were sipped dry. Great swathes of land were stripped clean of all vegetation and most animal life. The area is now called the Sahara desert.

As long as the giant eats, the giant grows. Unfortunately for the giant, the larger it becomes, the more effort it takes to move. Eventually, a giant can become so large that it can’t really move anymore and it lies down upon the earth to sleep.

Look now to the horizon and you may actually see one sleeping. Sleeping giants are often mistaken for mountain ranges.

While sleeping, giants’ hearts slow down and beat maybe once every twenty or twenty-five years. Sometimes they are mistaken for earthquakes, but more often, the giant is so covered with dirt, trees, and rocks from the centuries of sleeping, that the heartbeat only causes rockslides. The noise of it is dismissed easily as thunder in the mountains. For all who care, never attempt to wake a sleeping giant. Even if they are so large they can barely move, if a giant were to roll over, entire cities could be squashed. A simple cough could produce winds powerful enough to topple tall buildings. Even a simple deep breath could create a vacuum that could suffocate thousands of people.

Let sleeping giants lie.

Humiliation

2004-08-03T10:22:00.000-05:00

It was the day I didn’t fight back and it is among one of my biggest regrets in my life.

High school is not an easy time for anyone. It is even worse for the socially inept. We were the bottom feeders, living off of the scraps from others. We had a good day if we successfully escaped the notice of everyone. We gathered in classrooms during lunch, avoiding the places where the more socially skilled chose to eat. We had our secure locations where we were masters – the computer lab, the chemistry lab, even the art rooms and theater. We also had the one place where we felt our very existence was threatened: the gym.

I had many moments of humiliation in gym class. Not all of these moments were at the hands of my fellow students, many were due to my own lack of coordination or strength. Have you ever seen the cartoon about the boy who climbs the rope in gym and then gets stuck at the top? I didn’t think I had enough upper arm strength to climb the rope in gym class so I trapped the rope between my feet and used my legs. Before I knew it, I was at the top of the rope. My legs pushed me easily to the top. Unfortunately, the same maneuver didn’t work well in reverse. As I lowered my hands on the rope, my torso swung out away from the rope and I started a slow spin. I was stuck there for what seemed like hours. Essentially, the only way I could see to get down was by slowly sliding. Gravity is cruel and friction is evil. The rope burn wasn’t too bad, better than everyone in the gym watching me perform an unintended acrobatic show.

Of course I was picked last for the teams (why gym teachers decided this was a good way to choose up teams is beyond me, they should just assign the teams and be done with it). That is a humiliation that everyone seems to have had… which is odd since only one kid can be picked last. Even I am embellishing here. I was usually fourth or third to last. I would be standing with the rest of the bottom feeders wishing I was dead instead of waiting for people I had no respect for or desire to know decided my fate for the next thirty minutes of my life. There are few things worse than waiting for two people and their advisors decide which is the best of the worst.

On the field, the court, the floor, or wherever – the threat of humiliation was limited and centered mainly on one’s skills or personal appearance. Tripping while running, scoring in the wrong goal, having to be ‘skins’ against the ‘shirts’ when your back is covered in acne. Expect no pity from the gym teachers because they are attempting to treat everyone as an equal. Too bad they don’t realize everyone isn’t equal and their efforts only help hammer home that point so when no one in authority is around, the bottom feeders became fodder.

My greatest humiliation came during my freshman year after the gym class finished that day’s activities. We were all standing in the hall that led to the locker room where we changed. James Allen, a bully since I first met him in elementary school at R.H. Radley in East Helena, came up to me. My instincts were telling me to stop him, the survival instincts built into each and every human by design or nature to help protect the species were screaming at me to prevent him from taking whatever action he was going to take. Yet, my mind was telling me that in a fight both people will get punished. Oddly enough, I feared punishment more than anything. It was my ingrained desire not to cause other people hardship. If I got punished, that would include detention, which means my parents who lived far outside of town, would have to go out of their way to get me.

Let me back up a second so the weight of this decision can be fully felt. I lived some 35 miles outside of the city of Helena. My only connection to the city was by the school bus. Ever since I began riding the school bus there was only one rule: don’t miss the bus. Missing the bus meant my parents would have to make the long trek into town and pick me up. This mandate became more critical when my father suffered his heart attack and no longer went to work in the city and my mother took a job to help pay the bills. Only a selfish child would heap extra hardship onto his family by getting into trouble that could be avoided.

James Allen wrapped his sweaty shirt around my neck and began twisting. I kept saying to myself that if I began to choke, I’d fight back. I just stood there, hoping that in someway there was dignity in silently allowing another person to perform a bit of torture upon me. The shirt never tightened enough to choke me, as that was not James Allen’s purpose. I couldn’t fathom what he was trying to do and even suspected he was merely trying to goad me into fighting back. I figured his strategy was to do something totally benign though bizarre to me in hopes I would fight back and he and the rest of the guys in the gym class would laugh at my antics that would make me look even more like a total loser.

I blacked out.

James Allen’s real purpose was to limit the flow of blood to my brain to cause me to black out. I woke up seconds later on my back with all the guys in the gym class gathered around me. I recall the looks of relief on a few of their faces. I was helped to my feet and seconds later Mr. LeBrun, the gym teacher came to unlock the locker door. I kept thinking how things would have been different if only he would have shown up earlier – either while James Allen had his shirt wrapped around my neck or while I was prone on the floor. I chided myself for getting up so soon, I should have stayed on the floor until he showed up. I kept thinking that in someway I needed the authority figure to acknowledge my victim status and to see the victimizer punished.

It took several years for me to come to the realization that I need only have followed my instincts. I should have fought back. James Allen would have beaten me bloody – his skills at fighting were far beyond my own, but I would not have been a victim. I would have stood up for myself, something I never learned how to do. I can do it for others but not for myself. Many people would have been inconvenienced. I may have even had to go to the hospital to fix a broken finger or nose. The cost of which would have been a drain on my family, but at least I would have kept some amount of dignity and honor. I would have at least established that you can’t play those kinds of games on me because I will fight back. All I established that day was I was a pushover. There are no martyrs in high school. No one recalls the day when I stood in silence as another person humiliated me. There isn’t a section in the yearbook for The Most Victimized.

I have many reasons why I really don’t like being around people. The fact I didn’t stand up for myself is my own failing, my own humiliation that I carry with me. There were nearly eighteen other guys in that hallway – none of them stood up for me. None of them even questioned what James Allen was doing. I learned many lessons that day, and though I fundamentally despise society, I am very willing to stand up for someone who is being victimized. Who knows, they may be able to fight back, but maybe they have to make sure they catch a bus to get home. Maybe they think they are choosing a lesser evil. Maybe they are merely paralyzed in fear. I no longer have to catch a bus and I know it is easier to act on someone else’s behalf than my own.

How would things have been different if one or two others in that hallway would have simply said something instead of standing in silence? I still would have been humiliated but not nearly as badly.

The postscript to all of this is James Allen went on to kill his girlfriend several years later.

What would have been different if someone stood up to him in that hallway?

Metawriting

2004-07-30T16:42:00.000-05:00

The first sign a writer is hard up for a topic to write about is the writer begins to write about the craft of writing.. Unless the reader happens to be a writer or aspiring writer, deep rooted boredom will set in. There is no reason to read something on a topic that has nothing to do with your life when there are Maxim’s and Glamour’s to be read.

When a writer writes about writing, it is called ‘metawriting’. The most annoying thing about metawriting is the self-referential statements like “this sentence contains the word ‘self-referential.’” All of this, while a bitter disappointment to a reader who wants to read something with wit and verve, is a necessity to the writer with writer’s block.

In each writer is the hope that as long as the quill is moving and the ink is flowing, the block that is preventing a masterpiece of literature from being crafted will crumble. That rarely happens.

Lately, as I struggle with my own craft, I’ve been seeking out places willing to pay money for my work. There is always a demand for writing. Every catalogue, website, or encyclopedia needs a writer [note to self: develop a character who is a writer who writes for an encyclopedia on writing]. In this fruitless search, I’ve come across one publication that wanted a writer to ghost write articles on finance as if the articles were written by a dog.

I’m not making this up. Such a premise is rather stupid to be a conceit to further this tale regarding writing. The ad that was asking for these bits of written work didn’t indicate the publication that would be using these works. I was left wondering if it was a magazine for people who loved dogs or a magazine for those people interested in finance. In either case, I can’t see where a dog would be a sound investment advisor. I could see it if a dog had once made a fortune on a stock market or scrimped and saved over time to buy a house of his own, but really, do dogs even know what money is?

I don’t even think we regard dogs as inherently good at economy. Ants understand the need to save, or at least the parable of the ant and the grasshoppers leads us to conclude they are. Squirrels know about stockpiling, but the truth of squirrels is they don’t remember the location of the stuff they stockpile and in the winter different squirrels randomly find the stockpiles. So a squirrel that is saving isn’t necessarily protecting his future, but the future of other squirrels.

Dogs bury bones, I guess. If I were to write such an article, I think I would do a pun thing based off of bones and bonuses. You know, when you get a bone/bonus, don’t eat it/spend it all, instead bury/save part of it for later. It wouldn’t be a very good article, but honestly, if you’ve taken the time to actually read those personal finance advice columns that is about the level of intelligence they offer.

The odd thing is, as a writer, I find the concept of writing about a dog’s perspective of finance to be kind of interesting. As you can probably tell, I’ve already given it some amount of thought.

Before the original point is completely lost, the idea is writers write about writing as an excuse to not write about stupid things like a dog’s perspective of finance. A writer knows that once he steps onto that path, selling his skill to craft something like this there is no turning back. If Michelangelo had painted signs for vendors at the market instead of works of art, he wouldn’t have ever been known. As I mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of need for writers. There is always a need for another list of the 5 Reasons Why Men Leave the Toilet Sit Up or 16 Ways to Spruce Up Window Bunting.

When you aspire to be a Hemingway or even a Piers Anthony, you can’t if you take that path, that path of selling your skills to craft things that will be thrown out in a month for a newer version of the same thing you had written. When you aspire to write a masterpiece, you are aspiring to immortalize your craft. Every writer wants to write that one piece of literature, one couplet of poetry that others will memorize, keep in their hearts, and repeat hundreds of times in their lifetime.

There is nothing wrong with the writer who does take the path of writing unremarkable things. That writer will have a career and a steady paycheck. The world only has so much room for Steinbeck’s and Grisham’s. There can only be one Tom Clancy and everyone else is a pretender. When a writer writes about writing, you have to forgive him. He is only trying to stay away from that path of writing those things that may be a path to a steady paycheck, but won’t inspire a reader any longer than it takes the reader to flip the page to the next list of things that will make the reader’s life so fantastic that the reader will no longer have a need to buy the magazine that gives out all the advice.

Sometimes, the writer may actually even writer something profound enough about writing that even the most disinterested reader will perk up and take notice. Maybe there is some advice, some element of reasoning in the writer’s opinions regarding writing that might apply to other aspects of the reader’s life. That would be the sign of a skilled writer, though and would be remarkably rare. More likely there wouldn’t be much in the piece that applied to anyone but that particular writer. Such is the nature of the business though. Universal lessons just aren’t that easy to develop, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Play

2004-07-29T11:34:00.000-05:00

“The trouble with the world today is people don’t play like they used to,” the grizzled old man said to me as we waited for our separate lunch orders at the small deli up the street from me.

“How do you mean?” I asked, expecting a rant against television, videogames, and all that rot that is normally ranted against by someone who think having fun should involve hours of back breaking labor.

“I grew up in southern Illinois, a small rural town and we knew how to play as kids. We’d play hide and go seek until nightfall all throughout the summer. Or baseball when I was older. My friends and I would also go off to the river. We’d swim, eat sandwiches, goof off a lot.”

I nodded. I had a similar childhood. My summers were spent at home on Canyon Ferry Lake in Helena, Montana. I recall playing yard games with the neighbor’s grandchildren. We’d play tag, Red Light, Green Light, Simon Says, and all sorts of other games. We’d do it well past nightfall. Summer also meant fires on the beach roasting marshmallows. The fires weren’t casual things. We’d get down there early in the day, cutting willows for roasting skewers, gathering wood, setting up the fire ring and arranging the seating.

The fire was always large, or seemed large to me in my youth. Roasting marshmallows was a dangerous thing – for the marshmallow as it would most likely burst into flame. With a marshmallow fully alit, I would run down to the lake to douse it. I really can’t give a good explanation as to why I would do such things, I just did.

Around the fire would be family and friends. There always seemed to be a cousin around. That was one of the signs of summer for me. Living on the lake, all the family would come to our house to enjoy summer weekends. The lake itself offered countless hours of entertainment, whether it was swimming, boating, skiing or just floating on an inner tube.

The grizzled old man compared his childhood with his grandkids. “My son has to take them to scheduled baseball games. What is wrong with a pick-up game? If the kids have a moment of unscheduled activity, they are bored stiff. It isn’t that they want to watch TV, they don’t. But they don’t know what to do with unorganized time.”

I understood his point and understood what he was saying about knowing how to play. It isn’t the type of activity that is bothersome. It is about being self-sufficient enough to entertain yourself. While I came from a large family, I was the youngest, so as I grew up, my brothers and sisters left home. My summers in my adolescence were lonely. While everyone else I went to school with were in town going to parties, forming nascent romances, I was still at the lake. The neighbor’s grand kids were older than me and didn’t care to play those childish games like they once did.

I kept myself occupied though. I dove into reading books and keeping in contact with a few friends from school as best I could.

I learned how to entertain myself. I learned about the essence of imagination. What I missed in socialization, I more than made up in developing daydreams and fantasies. I am not going to lie and say I was never bored, but it was rare. There was always someplace I could walk to. Walk the mile to Jo Bonner Park at the base of Magpie Bay, or walk two miles over to Kim’s Marina and Riley’s Bar to play video games. Sometimes I’d just walk up Magpie Gulch to see how far I could get before tiring out. To me it was pure exploration.

The old man got his order and said bye to me. I watched him and wondered if he still played. I could see him enjoying a game of checkers or chess. He seemed to be the type that would spontaneously throw a few sodas in a bag with a peanut butter sandwich and drive a few hours to see the World’s Largest Ball of Earwax or some other bizarreness, just because.

I often lament what my childhood could have been. I could have been one of those city kids with lots of friends around all the time. If that had happened though, how would I have turned out? I know a lot of people now who always have to be doing something. They feel out of sorts with unorganized time. I revel in it. They say they are bored, I say I am set free. Two hours where I am not required to do anything or think about any particular thing is two hours I can slip into my fantasy world: a world that calls out to be explored.

When I was on my own in Chicago for the first time, I didn’t have anything. I lived in a tiny studio apartment, with no furniture, no TV, only the radio for entertainment. I had countless hours of free time and I explored. There was always someplace to walk to, always somewhere to go to see something new. Living without a car, without friends nearby, with only myself for company, I was able to draw upon the lessons of my childhood and the lessons of learning how to play.

Play teaches out how to interact with other people. That is probably the most important part of playing. We learn to share, we learn to compromise, and we learn how to lose and win gracefully. These are the things coaches of team sports stress. What is forgotten, the hidden lesson of learning to play, is learning how to keep yourself entertained. The game you play isn’t important. It is just a vehicle for the imagination. Take two people of the same culture, strand them together with a few small stones, cups, and knick-knacks and if they grew up knowing how to play, they won’t be bored. Those trinkets will be transformed magically into a new game. Or the area in which they are stranded will be thoroughly investigated and explored.

I know how to play. I enjoy playing. From board games and yard games to video games and role-playing games, there is never a reason to be bored. In college, my friends and I would sometimes be lounging, hanging out wondering what we should do. It wouldn’t take long before at the very least, we’d go on a quest of some sort. To those who know how to play, unorganized time is a secret blessing.

The Ugly One

2004-07-26T10:37:00.000-05:00

Looking in the mirror was never difficult for me. In fact, I was fascinated with my face. I would stare at myself for hours in the window during dinner. My family at first I saw something outside in the darkness, but when they discovered I was looking at myself like some psychotic bird that doesn’t realize the thing staring back is itself, I no longer could sit on that side of the table. I now realize that I was staring in the same way a person stares at a circus freak.

As a child I just looked odd. As an adult, I’m homely. Bulbous nose, splotchy pale skin, occasional acne, and hair that refuses to be styled any differently than it was when I was five make up the core of my features. My eyes are a muddled mix of green and hazel and I stand at a mediocre 5’10” or so, tall enough to be tallish, but not tall enough that my height becomes an admirable trait. Just average enough that my lack of attractiveness is at eye level with the rest of the world.

I used to think that my hair was a stand out trait that people would look at and say “Wow, what beautiful hair.” It is red, soft, thick and I’ll have it until I’m ninety. Sadly, hair isn’t a pro trait, only an anti trait. What I mean by that is hair is used to remove someone from consideration but someone doesn’t come into consideration because of hair quality. So the fact I have nice hair doesn’t mean much. Also, it isn’t dark enough to be considered a strong punctuation mark on my image. It is a fading red, slowly turning blondish which with my pale skin makes me look like I am fading out of existence.

I also lack a muscular physique. That would at least be another element like height that I could use to overcome my dismal visage. People would say, “he may be ugly, but he is strong and muscular.” Though it wouldn’t mesh well with my personality. That is the other issue at hand, personality. A person with a great personality often is able to overcome physical shortcomings. A strong wit, charm, extroverted ways can go a long way. I don’t have any of that. I’m a shy person by nature. I am not funny, I don’t tell jokes or anecdotes, and the most charming thing I can say to another person is “I like your [article of clothing].” I don’t even use people’s names while talking, though that is a big charm ‘no-no’ because people love to hear their names spoken. Anytime I try it, it feels phony. Why do I have to keep saying a person’s name in a conversation? Are they suddenly going to forget that I am addressing my remarks to them? I may be boring but I think a person that I am in a conversation with wouldn’t forget such a thing.

I can’t make people laugh. I am less than handsome. I don’t have any interesting personal traits that help overcome my lack of comeliness. What I have is a good heart, soft shoulder, and good intellect. My everyday interests also force me away from normal society. I like movies, but not enough to be a walking Internet Movie Data Base of information. I like music, barely. I don’t enjoy most concerts because I hate standing for hours in the midst of people. I play video games but I rarely finish them and I don’t obsess over my computer system, spending tons of money in order to be able to play the newest games. I can discuss politics and philosophy, but usually my interests in those topics are on a level most people don’t think about. I often believe I am a renaissance man when it comes to knowledge – knowing a lot about many different things. Yet, it is all so esoteric that it doesn’t matter to most people. I can’t tell you who won last nights sporting match-up, who will be in the playoffs, who will be the most valuable player, or any of the stuff that normal people care about.

All this means is my conversation skills are just as bad as my physical attractiveness. I’m more comfortable in the world of ideas when most people just want to talk about what has happened in their day. I rarely talk about what happens in my day because, well, I hate my days. Yes, I do realize that could be why I am a bad conversationalist – I don’t have enough passion about anything to talk about it. Sadly, the things I do have a passion about, I feel most people just don’t care. Honestly, take this piece of writing, does anyone really care that I am ugly? Will this spur others to examine the aesthetics of humanity? Doubtful. Yet, I have a passion about my overall attractiveness.

Maybe a tattoo would spruce up my outer beauty? Shave the beard or keep it? What if I wore contact lenses that turned my eyes blue? How white should I make my teeth? Should I tan? What if I did a spray on tan instead of the harmful UV light tanning? How much change should I go through in order to become attractive? Does God really make unattractive people? We look at many different trees and note which ones we think are beautiful and which ones we don’t but all of them are miracles. All of them are something beyond our scope of accomplishing. Am I not as worthy as all the trees in the world to be considered a miracle? And aren’t miracles by the nature of being a miracle beautiful?

Who am I kidding? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and society shares the same sets of eyes. I am unattractive. I can accept that. I shall serve as a contrast. I may not be attractive but people will be known as being attractive in comparison to me. Perhaps that is the miracle that was planned. How can we be sure if someone is truly attractive unless we can compare him to someone who isn’t attractive? Light and dark, wet and dry, we are known by our opposition.

Fear

2004-07-23T09:15:00.000-05:00

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” Frank Herbert wrote this as a litany of his futuristic vision of religion. It is often quoted because it is real. It is meaningful. It resonates with us. We know in our hearts, in the depths of our soul, that fear is a vile and weak reaction. Those who cower in fear are forever enslaved.

Fear is the mind-killer.

When we fear something, we cede power to it. At that point, rational thought no longer works. Fear corrupts logic. Fear can actually make us act against our self-interest by creating a mirage of what our self-interest actually is. We fear something and we think by avoiding it, by giving into the fear, we are acting in our self-interest through self-preservation. We assume that which we fear will destroy us. We make that assumption because we have rolled over and given ourselves fully to our fear. We become the puppet.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Every time we cave to fear, a part of us dies. It can be a slow painless death though. We may not even realize it is happening, like falling asleep in a room filled with carbon monoxide. A slow gentle death. Whether you die quickly or slowly, painfully or painlessly, the end result is the same and it is a matter of whether or not you choose to rage against the dying of the light or accept it with nothing more than a whimper.

What has fear prevented us from doing? What choices have we made only because we feared one path over the other? There are many metaphors that come to mind when discussing fear and how it destroys us. Imagine a man who has capsized his boat in the ocean. The boat sinks and he is left floating above it. The shoreline is miles away but visible. He wears a floatation device and knows how to swim, but he fears being in the ocean. The fear has led him to hold on tight to a rope that is tied to the boat, which is now resting on the bottom. He lashes the rope around his waist believing that if he can stay put, help will arrive. As the tide comes in, he is held tight by the rope. The waters rise above him and his life vest wants to lift him above it. Soon the water is above his head and he drowns.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty stupid man, but the metaphor is sound. Do we hold onto our fears stronger than we hold onto the willingness to save our lives?

Fear is easily dismissed when it comes to life and death situations. In the movies the person who has a fear of heights needs to jump from one building to another in order to escape a certain death. Guided by competing fears, the fear of death wins and the person jumps, overcoming the fear of heights.

What about if the issue at hand isn’t a life or death issue? How do we handle fear in those cases? Take the fear of rejection as an example. It is a common fear that most of us have experienced. No one likes to be rejected, but many of us have an absolute fear of it. Being told no, in our warped belief, will destroy us in ways we can’t even imagine. Some of us are able to overcome the fear and actually take the risk. The more often the risk is taken, the greater the chance that the rewards will be reaped. Those of us who never overcome our fear, will never reap the rewards. That is a fact.

Fear of the unknown is the one fear that gets to most of us. Before us are two paths, one that is clear and known, though one that we really don’t want to take. The other path is completely unknown. There are no guidebooks, no rumors about, nothing. Taking that path means accepting whatever horrible, awful things might come along. We can imagine all sorts of ways in which that path might destroy us. Many of us can’t see the potential rewards as being worth the risk. A few of us, though, who don’t allow fear to control their lives, forge onward and walk into the darkened path, facing the unknown, taking the risk, and possibly reaping the reward.

Too many of us will take the clear path, because known risks and sacrifices are more acceptable than unknown risks and sacrifices.

What are you afraid of? Rejection? Failure? Success?

Personally, fear of failure weighs heavily on my mind. I fear making decisions that will leave me homeless, leave me bereft. One of the reasons for that fear is the lack of a solid safety net. Most people have families they can fall back on to help them through difficult times. I cannot. Some people have significant savings they can use to bridge those gaps, my savings while existent, is less than significant.

The laws of chance dictate that if risk isn’t taken, no rewards can be given. Unless we ante up, we won’t have a chance to see if we can win the pot. Failure is assured by not playing. And we can’t kid ourselves into thinking that we won’t ever fail. Failure occurs more often than success. Luckily, while we may hold onto our failures for the rest of our lives, the world as a whole only cares about our successes. We have the world’s permission to fail as often as we need to until we succeed. All the world cares is we never stop trying. Stop trying and then the world will brand us as a failure. Better yet, we need to not worry about the labels success or failure and just keep doing. Keep moving. Like a shark, we die when we stop moving.

Fear nothing.

Roosevelt wanted us to fear fear. Quite the contrary, we should fear nothing. We should realize that we are the masters of our world, our universe. Fear should never be taken into account when calculating risk. Fear clouds our judgment and does nothing to truly protect us. Fear is the reaction of the weak. We can be frightened by something, but never fear it. Fear is what the deer feels when it freezes in front of the headlights of a car at night. Fear contributes nothing to survival, except in those rare cases where non-movement and inaction prevent you from being killed. We can easily see now how fear is a throwback reaction to being hunted by small brained reptiles who could only find their prey when the prey fled.

A Fish Tale

2004-07-21T11:25:00.000-05:00

I am not a fisherman.

I grew up on a lake in Montana and I am not a fisherman. I have fished. I’ve sat along riverbanks, trawled on boats, stood in the middle of streams, and shivered on ice sheets in the middle of winter. I am not a fisherman though.

I’ve hooked perch and carp. I’ve pulled in a sucker and a very small rainbow trout. The perch were the easiest to catch because I would take a lantern and pole out at night, go into Magpie Bay, sit on a neighbor’s dock and reel them in one after the other. The lantern attracted so many perch that I didn’t even need to bait my hook. Drop the hook in the water and a perch was bound to snag itself.

I am not a fisherman. I never had a fishing license. I’ve never woken up at dawn in order to go fishing. I’ve never fished for more than thirty to forty minutes at a time. Even the one time I was deep-sea fishing, I became bored very quickly and preferred to watch the ocean instead. The most compelling piece of evidence I can offer as to why I am not a fisherman is I can’t clean a fish.

Take my brother as a point of contrast. My brother is a sportsman, a term that encompasses being a hunter and a fisherman. My brother would willingly get up before the sun in order to drive an hour to go fish at some obscure river for an entire day. My brother would not willingly get up at any hour to go to school. My brother would sit on the ice that covered the lake for hours, checking homemade ice fishing poles, clearing ice from the holes, and drinking coffee from a thermos. His fingers would be red and chaffed and each fish he pulled out, he would toss on the ice until it was dead and then with his fillet knife quickly and efficiently clean it.

The cleaning is the real sign of a fisherman. You see the stereotype fishermen who bring home their catch and have their wives clean it. Those aren’t fishermen. Those are guys taking a weekend and pretending to be fishermen. Real fishermen takes his catch, handles it, cleans it, and fillets it. The cleaning is a matter of pride. Much like baiting your first hook with an earthworm, cleaning is yet one more step in becoming a real fisherman. I ran into problems in cleaning. First, the bones of the dorsal fin always stabbed me like needles. Second, the damn fish is so slippery and the knife is so sharp that I have the basic fear of slicing open my hands. And third, the smell of fish does not come off your hands, no matter how much soap and lemon you use. The guts don’t bother me. The innards are usually what disturbed most people, or the sound of descaling. Neither had much affect on me. Growing up in the country, there are just things that don’t bother you much. If it isn’t cute, furry and a pet, there is little emotion attached to dead animals.

The third and last step is cooking the fish you catch. Once again, my brother had this down pat. He would create a beer batter for perch and fry them up. Freshwater perch are small fish and don’t yield a lot of meat, so it does take five or six to make a meal for one person. That is five or six fish that need to be cleaned before they can be cooked. Once cooked, the perch tasted terrific. I cannot attest to the exact recipe that he used, but it was basically this:

1-cup all-purpose flour
1-teaspoon salt
1-teaspoon baking powder
¾-cup beer
½-cup milk
2 eggs

There had to have been some other spices in the mix. The fish fillets would get dredged through the mix and tossed in heated oil until golden brown.

I am not a fisherman and I don’t pretend I am. I never owned a fishing pole, though I found many that I used. I never had a tackle box, but I would walk the shoreline looking for lures that trawlers lost when the lure snagged on rocks or sunken branches.

Just because I am not a fisherman does not mean I don’t have a fish story to tell. Seeing that I am not a fisherman though, my fish story actually doesn’t have anything to do with fish. My fish story begins at Kim’s Marina, a small marina on Canyon Ferry Lake in Montana. The marina had two or three long docks that people could park their boats at. Off to the left of the main docks was a smallish area with a simple dock that people would swim in and like this one occasion, fish. I can’t directly recall my age when this occurred, but I had to be in my mid-teens, maybe 14 or 15. My Dad, long since retired from the Post Office, worked at the marina as a handyman. The marina was only two miles from my home and the owner’s son was my friend. So I had all sorts of reasons to be on the dock on that summer day with a fishing pole, pretending to fish.

When I fished on a dock, I had two methods I used. A bobber was my preferred method. The red and white plastic doohickey that would float on top of the water and jiggle if something was nibbling at the hook, the sign you need to jerk the rod and set the hook in the mouth of the prey. Using a bobber meant just sitting and that can get boring. So the second method was casting. That was fun but reeling the lure in at a steady enough speed so the hook didn’t settle on the bottom was difficult. I’m sure real fishermen understand at what rate you need to reel in the different types of lures to make sure they are at the appropriate depth to catch the type of fish you want. I lacked that knowledge then and still lack it now.

Often my hooks would settle on the bottom and I would spend ten minutes trying to undo the snag. That is what happened on this fateful day at Kim’s Marina. I snagged something on the bottom. Luckily for me, the hook seemed to get free fairly easily. When I pulled the hook from the water, there was a wristwatch attached. It was an older watch, waterproof, luckily and it was still working, though thoroughly caked in mud and muck. Probably the best thing I could have caught seeing I don’t have a problem cleaning a watch.

I wore that watch for several years. I wore it all the way through high school and into college. My freshman year of college, I went to South Africa. The story of why and how I went to South Africa is unimportant at this point in time. The important point was I was on the beaches of Durbin South Africa, swimming in the warm and intimidating Indian Ocean. Intimidating because I had only ever kind of, sort of swum in the Pacific Ocean and intimidating because of the shark warning signs that were posted on the beach.

As I bobbed in the water, struggling against the giant waves and dealing with the rip current, a mysterious thing happened. The current was so strong, it stripped the watch right off my wrist. The watch I had caught with my fishing prowess in Montana was suddenly a part of the Indian Ocean.

To this day, I wonder if that watch had a specific destiny it was trying to fulfill. Maybe it was on a journey back to the factory that created it somewhere in Asia. No matter what the truth of the watch’s journey was, it remains my one and only fish tale that doesn’t have anything to do with fish. That’s okay; I’m not a fisherman.

Road Bandits

2004-07-19T10:31:00.000-05:00

Tizzle sat on the stump and rubed his foot through his mudcaked, hole-filled sock with his scabbed and scarred hands. Tizzle glanced up the road and saw Rigger striding quickly away. “Wait up, will you?” Tizzle shouted to Rigger getting no response. Tizzle picked up his beat up leather boot with a large hole that ran through the bottom and top of the shoe and poured out equally large pebbles.

Tizzle thrust his foot in the boot. The laces of the untied boot flapped about his ankle as he jogged to catch up to Rigger. In contrast to Tizzle’s raggedy clothes, Rigger wore a fine country suit made of durable cloth, though it had seen better days and was patched in several places. A bowler hat hid Rigger’s bald head and her swung a long stick as thick as a man’s forearm about nonchalantly, sometimes using it as a walking stick and sometimes using it as a club, knocking the heads off of dandelions.

Rigger looked over to the panting Tizzle and asked, “Why are you out of breathe?”

“I got some rocks in my boot that I needed to take care of,” Tizzle said in between breaths.

“If you are going to take shoes from a dead man, you should make sure the shoes are worthy of being worn.”

“They were good shoes, until you shot him in the foot. You knew I needed boots, I don’t know why you had to shoot his foot. Wouldn’t the shin or thigh have served your purpose? Why the foot?”

“Everything is about you, isn’t it? I wasn’t thinking you needed boots back there. I was only thinking that he was getting away. I guess I could have just shot him in the head, but then we wouldn’t know which way the carriage went, now would we?” Rigger addressed Tizzle in a patronizing fashion, using the large stick to punctuate his speech.

“Besides,” Rigger continued, “at least now, one of your feet has a shoe.”

“Always the optimist, aren’t you?” Tizzle mumbled to himself. The two men walked down the road for an hour in silence. The sun had fallen low enough that it was hidden behind a large copse of trees. The two men walked in the long shadows, as the air cooled around them.

“Should we build a fire tonight?” Tizzle asked.

“Guess we better. I was hoping we’d stumble across a cottage or some travelers and set by their fire this evening,” replied Rigger.

Tizzle wandered to the side of the road and began collecting bits and pieces of wood as Rigger continued to stride forward. Once Tizzle had a full load of wood in his arms, he hurried up the road. Night was quickly coming and Tizzle had lost sight of Rigger. Tizzle finally came to a turnout in the road, a site of many campfires from the look of the blackened earth. Rigger sat on a rotting log gazing up at the stars in the clear sky.

Tizzle took a rag from his coat pocket and unrolled it, revealing a small knife and a few stones. He took the knife in his hand and began widdling at a piece of wood, creating as small pile of tiny flecks of wood. Though he wielded the knife as if he had done this countless times before, every once in awhile the knife would slip and he’d knick his hand.

After one particularly painful slice, he yelped. Rigger turned his head to Tizzle and in an unconcerned voice said, “If you’d just get the thing sharpened, you wouldn’t cut yourself so much.”

“If it were sharper, I’d take my finger off when it slips.”

Rigger turned his head back to the sky. He’d attempted this argument too many times to try it again tonight.

Tizzle gathered his little pile of wood chips and then took one of the stones in his left hand. In a quick motion, he struck the knife blade against the stone, sending out a little array of sparks. Tizzle did this several times until a few sparks landed on his pile of woodchips. He bent over and gently blew on the spark. The spark burned the wood, creating an ember. From the ember a tiny flame grew. The flame took life. Tizzle carefully set twigs on the flame. Twigs became finger thick branches, until the flame was able to engulf the chunks of dead wood he had collected alongside the road.

“Good work,” Rigger said, looking at the warm fire Tizzle had crafted. Tizzle pressed his bleeding hand against his dirty trousers and beamed at the praise.

“It is a shame we don’t still have some of that quail from last night, isn’t it. I guess we can savor the memory of it though,” Rigger said, moving closer to the fire.

“Yeah, it sure would sit well with my empty stomach. When do you think someone will find the body of the guard back there?”

“By now, I’m sure the animals have had him for their dinner. My concern is why was the guard back there in the first place. I certainly hope Ardur isn’t aware we are behind him and left the guard there to do us in.”

Tizzle laughed. “One guard? For us? That would be a true underestimation of who we are and what we are capable of. I’d be insulted if that were the case.”

“You are right, chum. Most likely he was a straggler. Probably sent back with a message for someone. It doesn’t much matter. If Ardur is aware we are coming up behind him, there is very little he can do about it.”

Tizzle cackled as he tossed another chunk of wood on the fire.

Rigger lied down on the ground, still staring up at the stars. The fire warmed his face and gave everything about it an orangey glow.

The morning was gray and damp. No rain had actually fallen yet, but the clouds were like children carrying full cups of water. They were going to spill, it was just a matter of when. Rigger awoke slowly, the chill of the morning air making his bones hurt in a most unnatural way. Tizzle awoke earlier and gathered berries from nearby bushes. One of Tizzle’s rags sat near Rigger, heaped with various types of berries. Rigger reached for the berries as Tizzle popped up from behind a rock. Tizzle’s face was splotched with redness and he seemed pained.

“Don’t eat the small reddish ones. They’ll give you the runs something awful,” Tizzle said before squatting behind the rock again and making some obscene noises.

Rigger flicked the berries from the rag and sampled the others. “Good thing you told me,” is all he had to say over Tizzle’s moans.

The clouds finally spilt their rain as the two men trudged up the road. Rigger had pulled out a short pistol and looked it over. “I’ve got two shots left and my powder is wet. It looks like Ardur might get an even chance today.”

Tizzle looked worse that before, as a rash had overtaken his entire body. A very nasty reaction to the red berries. All efforts to quell the itching had failed, but the evidence of the attempts was still noticeable. Tizzle smeared mud on his face and he had tried to scratch his back with a branch, leaving twigs and leaves poking out of his jacket. The rain only added to Tizzle’s misery. “I’m in no mood for fair fights today. If we don’t have the pistol, then I say we try to get ahead of the carriage and ambush Ardur and his guards.”

Rigger walked several steps in silence. “Often I question your intellect, Tizzle, but you surprise me. I should learn my lesson. You are right. We’ll cut through the brush when we spot them and take them by surprise. No reason to have a fight on fair ground if it can be avoided, eh chum?”

Tizzle wasn’t paying attention to Rigger as he battled an itch that couldn’t be itched. “Feels like ants crawling on the inside of my skin, Rigger. My empty belly is a traitor to my well being!”

Rigger chuckled at Tizzle.

The two walked through the dreary rain, following the muddy road. Eventually, they caught sight of the carriage. A large armored wagon pulled by four oxen. A teamster on each side of the oxen team and one on top of the carriage drove the vehicle forward. Two guards walked in front and three walked in back. The carriage itself was fifteen feet in height and twenty feet long. Six large spoked wheels carried it along the uneven road.

“We are lucky, chum,” Rigger said in an instinctive whisper in spite of the distance from the carriage and the amount of noise it was making. “The rain has slowed them down even further.”

Tizzle paused and sniffed the air. “Also smells like they need to get some fat on those axels. They won’t be able to move too fast or else the wheels will burn right off that behemoth.” Tizzle was giggling in delight as he bloodied his skin with his filthy fingernails.

The two men trudged through the trees and brush, moving as quickly as they could to get ahead of the slow but steady carriage. Rigger swung his stick haphazardly at bushes, frightening fowl at times. Tizzle scurried behind him, ducking under branches, and hopping over fallen logs. Rigger stopped once and took his bowler hat from his head, wiping sweat and rain from his face. Tizzle caught up to him and collapsed against the trunk of a tree.

“How much further?” Tizzle whined.

“Another hour should give us plenty of time to prepare ourselves and be rested enough to make it a good show.”

As Rigger had said, the two did. Another hour in the forest gave them plenty of time to set up their ambush. The carriage was still a long ways away and the rain had stopped. The mud would still slow the carriage and the lack of water on the axles would also be a factor in how fast the large wagon could go.

Rigger went off an embankment and started throwing stones up onto the road. Tizzle, now mostly over his itchiness, took the stones and started lining them up to form a wall along the road to block traffic. The road was in such bad condition that it didn’t take much to make it impassable.

Once done, Tizzle climbed a nearby tree and sat on a thick branch. Rigger tipped his hat over his eyes and dozed alongside the road.

The carriage made such a racket coming up the road, squeaking and grinding. The sounds of whips and men urging the beasts ever forward, and the good natured conversation between the guards all announced the arrival of the much awaited carriage.

Tizzle gave Rigger a nod indicating that he was prepared. Rigger took cover in the tall grass along the road and continued to wait.

As the carriage pulled forward, the leading guards came across the stones in the road. “Hold up!” one of them shouted. “There’s an obstruction in the road. Come on, men, let’s clear this quickly!”

The three guards following the carriage rushed to the front. The teamster who sat on top also climbed down to lend a hand at moving the rocks.

Tizzle jumped down on the roof of the carriage as Rigger leapt up from the side of the road to the carriage door. The two moved swiftly and in unison. The carriage door was opened and Tizzle swung inside. Rigger still on the ground swung his stick into the carriage and with his free hand pulled at the unconscious guard inside. Tizzle helped eject the second guard.

Those clearing the obstruction turned quickly to see Rigger climbing into the carriage using the bodies of two guards as a stepladder and closing the door behind him.

Tizzle crawled over the lap of a finely dressed man who had an intense look of fear plastered on his face. Rigger took the seat next to the door. “Hello, Ardur,” Rigger said.

“What in the name of storms do you ruffians want?” Ardur shouted in a panic stricken voice.

“Why Ardur, you should know. We only want what you took,” Rigger responded.

“Took from you? I’ve taken nothing from you.”

Tizzle laughed as he explored the immense compartment they were sitting. There were all sorts of little doors, chests, and drawers. One drawer was a larder and contained fresh fruits and smoked meats. Tizzle grabbed a thick slab of black jerky and tore a chunk off with his teeth.

The shouts from outside movement of the carriage indicated time was running out for Tizzle and Rigger. The guards and teamsters would soon pry open the door. “We’ve little time for games, Ardur. The gems. Two weeks ago you and your merry band trapsed through a village and demanded the gems from the church altar.”

“Those were taxes! Taxes owed to the crown!”

Tizzle swallowed his salty meat before speaking, “The church isn’t supposed to pay taxes.”

“Who are you two? You aren’t churchmen!” Ardur shouted. The door to the carriage was now being pried open. The tip of a pike poked into the compartment and pushed the door away from the frame. Rigger slammed his boot against the flat of the pikehead, tossing the guard holding it into the side of the carriage.

“Churchmen? Gods no. We are help for hire. That village was rather upset at your robbery and posted a reward. My chum and I aim to collect that reward, see.” Rigger said as he readied his large stick.

“So where are the gems?” Tizzle asked, drawing out his dull knife.

“Here! Here they are!” Ardur shouted, opening a small chest filled with gold and six perfect sapphires. Tizzle plucked the gems from the box and reached back for a handful of gold. Rigger rapped Tizzle’s hand with the stick. “Only the gems. Our reward will come from the village.”

The two of them got near the door, which was now cracking and creaking with the force of several pikes prying at it. “Are you ready, chum?” Rigger asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Tizzle responded.

Rigger lifted his booted foot and smashed it into the door of the carriage. His strong kick sent the door flying off its hinges. It also provided a shield for the two men as the followed it, tumbling to the ground.

Ardur was already shouting for them to be killed. Rigger pulled out his useless pistol and aimed it at Ardur’s head. “I can hit a fly at this distance, Ardur, and your head is much bigger than a fly.” The guards hesitated. Tizzle fled into the woods and Rigger backed away slowly before turning and diving into the brush after his partner.

The guards ran after them. Tizzle and Rigger sprinted but did not exert themselves too much. The forest was large and they knew all they had to do was get out of sight and lay still until the guards were called back. Ardur wouldn’t like to sit there without all his protection around him.

The two found their opportunity in the form of a giant tree that had fallen many years earlier. Rot had hollowed out most of the trunk. Tizzle uprooted several bushes and used them to hide the hollow Rigger and he could barely fit in. In as much silence as two men crammed in a tight space could maintain, they sat there, listening to the guards trudge to and fro in the forest. The sun had moved from morning to afternoon before the guards gave up and made their way back to the carriage.

“Well, chum,” Rigger said, “It looks as if you’ll be able to get a new pair of boots after all.”

Tizzle nodded enthusiastically as he checked on the six sapphires he had wrapped in one of his many rags.

Embedding the Essence

2004-07-16T12:15:00.000-05:00

Past Lives

Once engaged in a conversation with people who believe they have past lives, you’ll quickly discover that the jokes are real. Everyone seems to have been Napoleon, Caesar, Nefertiti, or Martha Washington. Sure, every once in awhile you’ll find someone who claims to be a serf in the Dark Ages who died of influenza while working in the fields, but they are rare. The skeptical mind wonders how so many people could have been Joan of Arc in their past lives. If more than one person claims to be the same person from the past, many would argue that this discrepancy of logic is enough to be able to dismiss the whole concept of past lives.

What is it that is reincarnated, anyway, when people discuss past lives? Is it recycled souls? Is it mental energy that gets passed along? What mechanisms of physics and metaphysics are coming into play to allow one person alive right now to be able to recall that he was once someone else in a previous life?

With absolute certainty, there are several hundred different theories out there relating to the how’s and why’s of past lives. Each theory is most likely well documented in a book, the author of which is willing to, for a small price, help any one of the many readers of the book to find their past lives. For whatever reason, many people need to get in touch with their past lives. Some may be trying to address a wrong that was done to them. Others might be looking for something better than the lot in life they currently have. Whatever the reasons, they are looking.

Embedding the Essence

When presenting a new view on an old subject, it is best to state the new view boldly and brashly as if one were sweeping the table clear. Throw away all the old ways of thinking, because this new way of thinking will replace everything that has been. It is the revolution in the metaphysical world. So while what is about to be stated is being stated as if it were the new paradigm, it is no better or worse than what has already been said on the topic of past lives.

Living beings have a life energy in them that makes them living. When death occurs to a living being, that energy is released. When a new being is created, the reserve of life energy is tapped and the new being is alive. This energy will be called ‘essence,’ the stuff that makes you who you are.

Think of the essence as water. A human being requires, for the sake of presenting this argument, one quart of essence to be alive. A dog requires a cup. A blue whale requires several gallons. Upon the creation of a human, a quart of essence is withdrawn from the energy reserve. When the human dies, that quart is returned to the reserve. If that human lived an intense life, it is possible that life becomes embedded in the essence. When the next person is created and the reserve is tapped for another quart of essence, it is possible that a portion of the previous person’s essence will get drawn up into the bucket. Since this essence has a bit of the last person embedded in it, the new person may be able to recall events from the last person’s life. Essentially, the new person has the past life of the old person.

It is fairly simple to see how a person that truly embedded the essence, lived a full and vibrant life, such as Napoleon or Martha Washington, would release that essence back into the reserve and affect so many people created with it. Most people don’t embed their essences with anything worthwhile, so that portion of Martha may recylce over and over, breaking up smaller, merging with lost portions, and constantly recycling until something more significant becomes embedded into that portion of the essence.

Historical figures who have done significant things obviously are the types to have deeply embedded their essences with their personalities and deeds, making them more likely to be recalled when that essence is drawn into new lives. New lives may only take a portion of an embedded essence, which makes it possible for multiple people to all have a portion of the same historical figure.

The Key to Immortality

Embedding your essence is the key to immortality. Without a proper laboratory to be able to experiment with essence, there can only be speculation on what effectively causes an essence to become embedded with a person’s memory. Fame seems to be a factor, as does passion. Since fame is a difficult element to master, passion seems to be a better element to focus on.

To achieve immortality, one needs to fully embed his essence with his life. He needs to strive to make as many moments in his life mean something significant. He needs to be filled with passion as often as he can. Doing this increases the likelihood that some part of him will become embedded into the essence, which upon his death, will be released into the world to be reused for someone else. If the life is truly passionate, truly significant to him, then the new lives created with that essence would recall it. He will live on in all the new lives created.

There is no control, though, on how that essence will be used. The new life created may very well be a cricket. Yes, there may be a cricket out there right now that has the essence of Elvis. A dolphin born last year may have the essence of Princess Diana. On the other hand, right now, you may have the essence of a particularly passionate bear in you. Terrorize and abuse a dog and that essence, filled with the fear, pain, and trauma may be used to create a new child, a child who will for no apparent reason have a fear of the world, remembering it as being cruel and unkind.

Live passionately, help others live passionately, and be kind to all living things.

This is the beginning, These are the rules.

2004-07-16T09:33:00.000-05:00

My goals are simple. A minimum of 1,000 words, 3 times a week. That is 3 separate entries of at least 1,000 words. If one entry is 3,000 words, I still owe two more entries of at least 1,000 words. No word count rollover allowed.

The works can be fiction or non-fiction but it cannot be an information dump or a list. Everything will have to be crafted as if it were being published.

This entry does not count as an entry for the project.