hope is fear

If religion was the first salvation and government/institutions/law&order was second in the organization of society, as some anthropologists have argued, then the day was a long day and both were born on the same as twins.The organization of the human condition of frailty - neither sited nor blessed with speed - needed solutions.

I am neither hopeful nor fearful of the future. I believe that we can own our frailties and still command and direct our lives. We cannot do the same for others. We cannot even help them much of the time. The difference is not education and is not intelligence, it is simply one of relationships. I am as at peace with death as I am with life. I am also comfortable with failure and success. Many people expend their lives trying to define a single relationship with one of those elements - death, life, failure, success. A life focused on one end will end without any of the others. That is not acceptable to me. I need to fail. I must succeed. I will die, but before that I will live and nothing will stop me in that endeavor.

To me, this is the requirement that life has put before us: To Become. I will, at all costs including my own life, be free to do and act and think as necessary. I will learn and I will change and I will not change. In the end, regardless of all those things, I will also discover if there is a thing called me that is free of the history of the human condition. In the meantime, I will not hope for things for others or myself. I will not be afraid to face the best and worst of what life presents me. I will not fear my own or any other existence.

of all the slippery slopes

i had to slip on yours.....

Abandon All Hope of Fruition

could it be that hope and fear are the same...

for some things

no thing will work.

the air so dry, the wind so constant,

the thin sheets of paint dry almost instantly.
veils and veils over veils.

Contraband

I am in one of the cells on the upper deck
just me and my Maglight, looking under steel bunks and thin mattresses for contraband.
Contraband is in my daily vocabulary.
Contraband could be a number of things,
cigarettes
drugs
weapons
ink pens
1 too many comic books.
There is a particular smell to detention,
institutional cleaning supplies and their failure to mask urine and all the lost things.
In this cell there is no contraband.
the Maglight shines on some dust in the corner,
what am I doing looking for contraband.
I went to art school.

I am sitting on the tiny front porch of one of the bunkhouses

end of july
kick up a little dust cloud with my boot
the wind, neverending whisks it away again.