An Austere Farewell:

Today is the last day of your month of birth.

Tomorrow I intend to see my old tome again.

It is, after all, my possession.

I was only generous enough to lend it to you.

Take it as representative of our entire correspondence.

If there is any hope left for you, it is that you will have learned this much:

That you are not born equal to any one.

If you would find solidarity with any one or competence at any thing, you must earn it.

I have done you the service of reading and criticizing your writing.

You have had a competent teacher.

I have written my entire life.

I have even been called a genius.

It was entirely for my competence with language.

No set of material skills, not even musical (though I would have had it otherwise gladly) has earned me that title.

You have not been called a genius.

You would not feel insecure or inferior in my presence.

You would understand my attitude, if not my ways, rather than to presume that I am trying to trick you into feeling this way.

You would own up to your own feelings.

You would understand what they mean.

Or you would not feel them in the first place.

And I would be able to work with you as equals, mutually striving towards a Great Good by constant criticism, like two friends climbing a chasm by pushing each other into his respective wall, acting as one body with four feet. (Such as in The Emperor’s New Groove.)

And you would have made your status known to me.

For I all ways recognize a kindred soul.

I saw it in Alanna.

I see it in strangers.

I see it in acquaintences.

And even if I’d overlooked it in my rage, you would have brought it directly to my attention.

I would not have to mention it now.

And admit that even your own friends marveled at me.

They did not do so with you.

They called you crazy for even trying.

My friends do not do that, even if yours do.

And even some of yours qualified their criticism of me by insisting that I was brilliant.

I have no evidence that they have done so of you.

Why would they not defend your honour in my presence?

I only have your word that they take offense to how I speak to you.

It is hardly convincing, even if true.

If they were so convinced, they would have spoken up.

You could have learned much from me.

But you are insolent.

Instead of reciprocating my kindness with respect, you strain my patience to its limits.

You do not work to earn back my own respect.

And you have not shown me such kindness as would merit respect towards you.

I have no reason to regard you more highly than myself.

And yet in your own self-defense you have constantly required that of me.

[You will say now that you wanted only Equality.

Did you work towards that goal?

Did I see the results?

Or was it a demand made of me, as of an inferior?

Even now it is YOU condescending upon ME.]

If condescension could be a sin, then you would be the most condescending person that I know.

If my hope in you is not misplaced, you will meditate upon this long.

If it IS misplaced, you will retort.

And repeat the cycle.

But this time I shall not be party to it.

I shall be free of you instead.

Instead of respect and improvement you reciprocated with abuse and insult.

You lied to protect your vainglorious self-entitlement.

You hid from yourself in your so-called friends.

You would sooner use false, unenlightened criticism as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility than use my enlightened criticism as an opportunity to improve.

I do not know what is the matter with you.

Didn’t you have a childhood?

Was there not the promise of one day being GREAT at some thing, but only by subordination to a discipline?

Who are YOU to be so GREAT as to demand respect prematurely?

Even now it ought to be obvious to you that I care excessively.

I will not be around to receive answers to these questions.

Even this letter is a thankless task.

If you are to take any thing away from this, may it be this:

… That the TRUTH, if offered freely, is to be accepted even without adornment. Beggars cannot be choosers, and your starvation for Truth and Divinity is made more obvious by your decision to surround yourself with people who have none to offer you, but would condemn you for your search.

Now *I* condemn you. But not for your search. Rather that you did not search ENOUGH on your own, to figure this out FOR YOUR SELF, and instead chose to depend upon me.

… That RESPECT is not owed to you simply for Being. The world will not bend to your ARBITRARY will. People of superior character must never be made to even spare a SECOND trying to make sense of your perspective. Their duty is much too precious to be wasted on some willful degenerate who DEMANDS respect because he cannot COMMAND it, and who would rather exploit the amorality and nihilism of his environment for personal gain than to work in its reformation. No person of noble character can rightfully be made to hear your say on matters of import. You must be of your own nobility and rely less upon the presupposition that people will value you as highly as you do yourself. I have had to choose my family over you, just as I had to choose Alanna over my room-mates in Cleveland, Ohio. I did this out of a sense of DUTY. I did not let my sense of offense and betrayal at the fact she chose K. over me to stop me from this duty. Ever.

… That you cannot hide within the crowd. I know when you are lying. I know it when you have to use some appeal to the Universal Love of God in place of a convincing warrant. Your God is too soft on you. He does not wake you up to your failings. I have had to berate myself incessantly for years to get to where I am. (I wish it were otherwise.) How dare you to berate me now? When some one condescends upon you, you NEVER fight back, especially if that person does so offering friendship and support. You subordinate yourself. You LISTEN. I have had to EARN the self-respect that you take for granted. If there was any thing of lasting consequence that I did in your favour, it was that I dispossessed you of this sense of self-respect. If I did so, then you will know that it was because you had not earned it. You are old enough to shed that narcissistic cocoon.

… And finally:

I never tried to put you down.

I tried to pull you up.

But you tried to pull me down.

That was why I let you go.

Poetically,

Dmytri Aleksandrovich Andreev.

Dm.A.A.

T.S.S.

Masculinity Tips for Women, delivered by an Experienced Man:

Masculinity Tips for Women, delivered by an Experienced Man.

It has been brought to my attention that this whole nefarious gender switch is not simply a corporate conspiracy to produce more C.E.O's, but that in fact men are changing as well, and not simply as a passive RESULT of feminism but rather as a consequence of mutual underlying causes.

One of the most powerful mystics I know insists that the Universe "mixed up all the vibrations". So now men are getting all the feminine ones and women are receiving the masculine ones.

But far from the romantic, naive notion that this will immediately transmute women into men and men into women, the cocoon phase we are stuck in puts women in the posture of boys and men in the posture of bitches.

So here are some friendly, helpful hints I have for both sexes (and I use that term interchangeably with gender, for reasons you have all ready surmised) on how to be a decent human being during these confusing times. May it nurture you as only a man playing the mother role can.

Women:

1. LISTEN TO MEN. Nothing could be more in accord with your underlying goals. Feminism has nothing feminine about it; it is all about owning the male role. If you want to get good at some thing, it would HELP to pay attention to some one with several millennia of experience in this medium. Okay?
2. TREAT MEN WELL. You should know how men treated boys who had not learned yet to respect the gentle sex. Now that gentlemen are the gentle sex, treat them with the same chivalry.
3. BE LOYAL. Being a guy means counting your sexual adventures and your money. Being a MAN means exercising reciprocity:
A. Love with love.
B. Trust with trustworthiness.
C. Courtesy with generosity.
D. Propriety with gratitude.
E. Existence with kindness.
Do these five and the rest will come of their own.
4. RESPECT TRADITION. People do not namedrop to sound smart and to gain ethos. They give credit where credit is due so that you can feel at liberty to supplement their knowledge with your own research. Carl Jung says that the neurotic rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways. Some things never change. Only the subtle man will notice them amidst the constant flux of novelty. Comprende?
5. LEARN TO PROVIDE. It's not all about you, either in the workplace, at the dinner table, on the podium, or in the bedroom. Don't be a d*ckhead.

Men:

1. BE A MOM. Learn to put up with women's bullsh*t with grace and tact. Have a say in your children's lives, BORN and UNBORN. It is significant that Trump signed a restriction on abortion whilst surrounded by men. These are the Mothers of the New Millenium, protecting the intrinsic value of a life that literally does not even HAVE a sex yet.
2. BE RECEPTIVE. You don't have to spend money every where you go to have a good time. You do not EVEN have to TALK to any one. Instead of standing up for yourself all the time, even when you KNOW you're wrong, learn the honour in backing down.
3. BE PATIENT. All good things come to those who wait. Slow and steady wins the race. Just don't do it in a passive-aggressive, toxic or sociopathic way. Learn to discern your passion from your aggression.
4. BE KIND. Women and men alike are going to suffer a lot of hardship during these times. Some times a smile and a reserve of judgment are all that one needs to feel one's self to be part of a Greater Force that can Heal.
5. BE. You might have noticed that all five of these imperatives begin with this word, whereas only ONE of the first five contained it. The masculine acts. The feminine IS.

Enjoy yourselves and each other.

Dm.A.A.

This Wretched Star Wars Meme:

The meme does us the service of bringing what would otherwise have been a subconscious (and potent) mythological truth to conscious light. Yet it does so in such a way that, simply owing to its memetic nature, trivializes what the Unconscious Subject would have venerated: The Truth of Obi-Wan’s position.

Obi-Wan DOES possess the Higher Ground over Anakin. He IS wiser, more disciplined, in many ways more clever, judicious, and poised than his Pupil. He has not suffered GREATER tragedy but has had to LIVE with tragedy much longer, as well as with responsibility. In every way he has all this time been Anakin’s Superior and has maintained both the Moral and the Intellectual High Ground. An accomplished agent of the Force and a diligent and loyal student of the Jedi tradition, his SUPERIOR posture as Sensei is at that moment both physical and spiritual, and the former represents allegorically the latter.

Anakin’s Tragedy is that he is Icarean in his ambitions. His passions are depraving; he is blinded by his emotions, which have not yet been made PURE by the Force nor CULTIVATED by the Jedi Order. So it follows that when he tries to OVERCOME his teacher by Force (no pun intended), he LOSES HIS LEGS, a representation of his agency and his fighting stance. He goes from a simply PRECARIOUS posture, floating over the lava, but still offered a chance at reprieve, to a total posture of DESCENT INTO and ABSORPTION WITHIN the lava: the passions that drive him to the Dark Side.

Carl Jung says that this is one of the most tangible evils of the neurotic state: that the neurotic “rejects the Force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways”. Joseph Campbell read Jung and drew inspiration from Jung’s wisdom, and he went on to mentor George Lucas.

The myth represents the hubris of the young in defying the wisdom of the Old. Of course, in turn Luke has later to fight his father for the same reason: that the Jedi Way has fallen and faded and the force of Tradition has become an oppressive State, so that that state’s most dangerous henchman is “all that remains of their religion”. In THAT sense, Luke represents a sort of PURE, SELFLESS rebellion against Age, but WITHIN an Age that is deformed and misguided, having parted with the Spirit (Force).

In ANAKIN’S case, there is no excuse to defy Obi-Wan. In fact, it is BECAUSE of Obi-Wan’s enduring influence that Luke wins the fight against evil and restores Balance to the Force. And it is nothing save Anakin’s own hubris and willingness to silence his old mentor’s voice forever that ensures that that same Voice would spell Darth Vader’s ultimate defeat. And in that case so much as in THIS one, that voice of Reason and Wisdom imparts fair warning upon the pupil moments before the pupil seals his own fate by taking it into his own cyborg hands.

So think on THAT when you call Obi-Wan Kenobi “condescending” with a condescension that you, unlike him, are not entitled to.

Dm.A.A.

MYRBOSCH: Episode #?!?!

MYRBOSCH: Episode #???

The Old Days:

The Old Days.

I could not help but to notice, when I got off the phone with Michael, who turns forty-seven I think this year, (next Tuesday to be exact_) that it is not often that people my age have conversations lasting seventeen consecutive minutes by telephone. Given this fact, (and I mean that both in the sense that I have been given it but ALSO that you, READER, have already received it and might be already bored) it is doubtful that most of my peers will read on. That is unfortunate. After all: they are those who need it most.

Whatever the case might have been on my end and as a second thought, I still had felt like I was rushing him, at that very moment (though he’d made and I had qualified immediately the preface that I “hate the phone” or, as I’d put it: “try not to talk too long.”). It is a testament to my seemingly Protestant character that I hesitated to call seventeen minutes (a lucky number) “much”, for I felt guilty for cutting our conversation “short”. I guess I fancy myself a busy man. Yet by the end of it I took this as an opportunity to assuage some of my restlessness and angst, a classic symptom of neurosis and not-having-one’s-feet-upon-the-ground. The guilt had been in fact the very CAUSE for my restlessness, for I am in the frequent habit of suspecting that if I am wasting time then I am sinning.

Against whom am I sinning? Who if not WOMEN?

As Michael rambled on and on I thought of them; they, after all, tend to be on my mind twenty-four/seven, if such thoughts can be quantified in such a fashion.

I thought of Michael’s generation. There is an ease with which the man speaks, though he stumbles. It’s the ease of some one who has learned to stumble gracefully. At some time, that is all that one had to do to get ANY thing done, and there was nothing more one COULD do.

It is not so now.

Now we (if I may) are sheltered by a proliferation of rules. They supplant the influence of our traditions, our encounters, and our experiences. The cell phone is one thing; at times I am ahead of Michael’s time, when cell phone use was prevalent, and yet at other times I’m far behind him, and I’d rather write a letter and have it mailed by some device more primitive and more ingenious than a typewriter.

The Smart Phone is an other. So are online social networks of all sorts.

It is bad enough to have to listen to Michael ramble when we could just talk about it all in person on his birthday. What is truly sad is meeting people. Every girl these days is on her phone or on the clock, and when you meet one through the Net you never know what you will get. (Or if you’ll “get” any thing at all other than a series of emojis and false flattery.)

As Michael rambled I thought about the notorious Wage Gap.

I imagined for a moment the nineteen-nineties as a time when women were more desperate for help because they made less money. Such had been the social narrative, long kept secret by patriarchal proto-Fascists, but then BROUGHT TO LIGHT! By social justice warriors back in 2014.

I thought of the film “The Santa Clause”, and what a prick that lead guy was. I wondered how he lived with himself and WHY. True: I knew why. It was not male self-entitlement. It was a deeper and more passive narcissism, a FEMININE narcissism in fact: the refusal to accommodate an other’s self-entitlement. A passivity alert only to its own self-perpetuation. A parasitic complacency and self-contentment.

How come such characters were so prevalent in the nineties? I mean: men have sex drives. Don’t they have some body to impress??

The feminist myth of the Wage Gap, for which no woman I knew to have been enflamed by it had ever managed to find evidence, was a likely story. But it was TOO likely. It was too simple. Like a lullaby. A fairy tale hardly worthy of being called a Myth in the Grand Sense. This was not the Wisdom that is produced in the Mystical Realm and transmuted into worldly form by Poetry and Literature. This was an URBAN myth, an IDEOLOGICAL legend. Propaganda. Proto-Fascism. Agenda. And most ironically: A SOCIAL NARRATIVE.

The solution is at once more simple and more complicated, for it leaves more of the TRUE, INTRINSIC complications found in Nature to the Imagination of the Individual Subject, uncharted territory to-Be-explored.

In Michael’s time there was not the neurotic need to IMPRESS the other gender. This had been transcended, so people could be blunt. They could be vulgar. They could be POLITICALLY INCORRECT. And somehow only a few came off as total narcissists. And they were made into stock characters in film, television, and other media.

May be this also dawns upon people at Michael’s age. I hope so. But I know better than to hope to excess. I am old enough, and living in such morbid times, as to have learned THAT much.

Getting off of the phone with Michael was like stepping out of a long shower and awakening from a long dream (though I would do well not to fall asleep in the bath, as we all would do well to avoid as well).  I felt LITERARY, as though I were in a novel of some sort or, to be more specific, as though my life made SENSE in relation to the records of the past. And the literature was not the Kafkaesque labyrinth of constant paranoia and bureaucracy, where to raise my head above the mass was to be guilty of elitism and insubordination. NOR was it such INFLATED self-aggrandizement that I lost all humility even as I DEMANDED it of others. (And this is NOT to say that I am not free to demand it of those who have not reciprocated my own consideration.)

I returned to my virtual women, their replicas upon my telephone screen, with a sense of earthbound clarity. The realm of EMOTION was still available to me, but I was free of what a certain religious philosopher and ethicist had called EMOTIVISM, and this freedom felt so BASIC and common-sensical that I remembered all of a sudden why I had so easily and readily absorbed that thinker’s thinking and all so why I’d become enraged by my “peers” who had sneered at me for even MENTIONING the word “emotive”, as though ANY form of criticism of the liberal status quo were blasphemous.

Yes: “liberal status quo”.

To use a contemporary adage:

It’s a thing.

Then I found several more coy, womanly faces looking up at me from the newspaper in the Living Room downstairs. They caught my attention; I observed. These were the faces of three writers who were concerned with “women” as a cause.

It dawned on me.

In Michael’s time “women” were not a cause. Any semblance of women Being-a-cause was but one of a number of semi-neurotic trends that might as well have been a grungy fashion statement.

WOMEN were much MORE back then. They were still Goddesses and Temptresses, Sirens and Angels, and most importantly: they were PEOPLE. And that meant that their value was determined entirely by relationship. To men, they were the Other. Yet they were also close enough to men, at a time when every one was Other to every one else, that one could slide into relation with them with incredible ease, even if, like heroin (a drug named after women as well), the easy slide was excruciatingly hard to slide OUT of.

Michael’s time was a more sophisticated time. Women had fewer rights because they did not NEED them. A right is simply a protection against the Other. Women did not NEED to be protected from men. To be woman was to IMPLY man. One did not have to simply identify “as a woman” as DISTINCT from man. It happened naturally that to BE one was to IMPLY the other, by virtue of relationship, and BY RELATIONSHIP ALONE, untarnished and untouched. It was a time of THOU, not IT relations: PERSONAL connections, not impersonal, Utilitarian ideological demands and self-entitlements.

AND MEN AND WOMEN GOT ALONG.

They did not need to blame the “creeps”; to be a “Creep” was cool, hence Radiohead’s song (which Michael had recommended that we cover, in his phone call). They did not blame the President; ALL politicians were corrupt, so why bother? Improve yourself; THAT was the spirit.

This is why people pretend that sex and gender are distinct. It’s but a mind game.

Ideology has segregated us and taught us what it MEANS to be a woman or a man.

It does not SOLVE the PROBLEM of gender roles. It CREATES it.

It is the very problem that it offers to resolve, threatening the Individual for disagreeing and delivering punishment by making the problem much more severe so that only the “protected” can survive, at great personal expense.

It is ideological extortion.

And the expense is Authenticity: the kind that only comes via Relationship.

Now if you don’t fit the role assigned to you by this society, you have the “option” of changing, but only if you claim that you were “born wrong” – DESPITE the notion that it is a Social Construct!!

My other writings deal more with the issue of Gender. It’s far more than a Social Construct. But my point remains.

Michael’s generation is evidence that progress is a recent invention.

Things are getting worse.

Yet somehow: talking to him I am reminded that they’re also getting better. NOT because of ideology; ideology is the anti-Christ that Jung spoke of.

But rather because some people still adhere, unknowingly (and thereby fittingly) to the Tao – the Way of Mother Nature.

And it is IMPERATIVE that those for whom it’s getting worse wake up and realise this fact.

Dm.A.A.

FINALE:

I have re-read

Alanna McLeod's last few letters to me.

I had to dive into my Soul again. Reviewing and sharing my most intimate (but publically relevant) letters TO her.

You could not write like her if you tried.

No one could.

Only a loving hand could have enscribed it.

A hand I fell for for a Divine Reason.

You shall never besmirch it.

It shall all ways belong to me.

No one can take it from me.

Kresten never did.

Things manifest their essence. I can spot falsity in even the most clever contrivances.

There were things Alanna knew that no one else did. She did not merely mirror me. She did not simply affirm my biases. I had no biases. I had no conscious knowledge of these things. They simply rested in the sinews of my Heart, untouched by callous hands.

Only Alanna could have had the delicacy to pluck those heart-strings. Only she ever bothered to. You could never do that. Nor could he.

Nor any one you claim to know.

This is the culmination of my Quest.

That I retain my faith in this maiden.

That I let not the cleverness of egoism and sedated paranoia assuage me.

I know now what happened and why.

I know that I can trust her. It was trust we'd worked to build. You never worked that hard towards that end. Towards any end. I know this. So any thing that you imagine to say that might besmirch it in your favour is but the haze of gossip and paranoia.

It shall not submerge her Light.

There is under the mirroring tendency a metaphysical undercurrent. Only this force can compel the Will to produce such a document that were I to divulge its secrets to you it would burn your eyes.

Rational Man knows not this faith. He is only concerned with the future. All disillusion happens in the future tense. It is a feeble, egoic defense against the vitality of the moment that is ruined the moment it is spoken to the wrong ears. It is they who bastardise it with analogy to some past heartache and trivialize it in a feeble attempt to protect you from the object of their own fears, a fate that can only befall once, for life is ever-changing...

The undercurrent is Love.

You have not known it.

I am sorry.

Dmytri.

Needless to say, I no longer require your services. Alanna is with me and all ways shall be. The Universe brought us together for a Reason. It has its ways. You would be arrogant to presume you could control them. But think not to place this arrogance upon MY conscience. I know now that it was YOU who had tried to force it from its course.

I forgive you. But our project is over. And I will not hesitate to purify you by violent means.

I will accept my book back now. But show your face not here ever again. If Alanna could let me go for this lifetime, then so can you. Unless you would rather admit her spiritual superiority?

Deliver the book by mail to my address.

And I pray you are not so stupid that you've forgotten it all ready.

Dm.A.A.

747 Words Exactly:

SPECTRUM.

[A young black man, a young woman with dyed hair, and a tall, proud-looking portly man with a beard and long hair tied back. All of them are seated on a rock underneath a Clock Tower at a Community College. The last of the three notices a scrawny, reserved character pass through the campus like a ghost.]

LEO: Oh, my GOD. RICARDO! HEY!

[Ricardo hesitates and then approaches silently.]

RICARDO: Fancy seeing YOU here.

LEO: FANCY. Yes.

RICARDO: Enjoying your education? What’s her name?

[She is silent.]

LEO: Hey, I read your blog. [just as matter-of-factly:] There’s some pretty homophobic stuff there.

RICARDO: [smugly] I prefer the term “heteroelitist”. After all: I am not an uneducated man.

LEO: Some of it’s pretty misogynistic as well.

RICARDO: [Pause.] I do not hate women. I simply have a selective view of what CONSTITUTES a woman.

LEO: So you’re just an old school Christian then.

RICARDO: [stridently, spreading his arms like a bro, inviting them to agree and give credit where credit is due:] HEY! The Judeo-Christian sexual ethic isn’t quite as bad as their economics. I mean: it actually WORKS!

AMY: If you’re heterosexual.

RICARDO: I don’t think I like your tone.

AMY: Well that’s too bad then.

RICARDO: No, don’t worry about it. It’s just that for a moment it seemed like you were trying to blame ME for the degeneracy of others.

LEO: Woah, there. I don’t approve of that sort of rhetoric.

RICARDO: And *I* don’t approve of that sort of attitude. [regaining placid composure.] But it is no matter. Yes: you ARE right. It is IF you’re a heterosexual, but it all so leaves no ALTERNATIVE but to BE heterosexual. I mean: that’s LITERALLY the entire ethic!

LEO: And what about the people who disagree?

RICARDO: What ABOUT them? This isn’t some sort of pansy neo-Liberal hogwash that says that you can do whatever YOU WANT, MAN. I mean: let us pray that the ethic that we live by is concerned with more than just “human rights” and self-entitlement.

LEO: Please: never use those two words in such proximity with one an other.

RICARDO: You are right; I was being redundant.

AMY: Okay I can’t stand listening to this. Will someone PLEASE shut him up?

RICARDO: I will continue where you and I left off, then babe. You said “IF YOU’RE HETEROSEXUAL”. But there IS no “if you’re”. In any TRUE society, there is only the “You Shall” or, as our antigeny put it: “THOU SHALT”.

LEO: But that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

RICARDO: On the contrary: it is the only UNIVERSAL argument that has been made today. HARDLY a matter of individual self-interest or partisan bias.

[He exits.]

DOMINIC: Can you believe that guy?

AMY: I don’t want to talk about him.

LEO: I liked him. He has convictions. One rarely sees them nowadays.

DOMINIC: PLEASE. If I want convictions I’ll log onto the Social Network.

LEO: Still: he speaks his mind. Even if it sounds backwards.

AMY: I can’t be around him.

LEO: Isn’t your whole thing “tolerance”?

AMY: [She stares.] Are you serious??

LEO: Hey. I’m not trying to judge you.

AMY: You BETTER not be.

LEO: It would be intolerant of me. So I couldn’t claim that you’re “not tolerant enough”.

[She visibly misses the hint, so he continues.]

LEO: But any way: Tolerance is not some thing that I really value.

AMY: HUH?!

LEO: There was a theologian and a poet named G.K. Chesterton. And he said some thing like: Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions. THAT guy over there… he has convictions.

AMY: Well. I have convictions about him.

LEO: It’s a start. I guess I should thank him.

AMY: How come??

LEO: I was always afraid you didn’t have any.

[She looks mortified.]

LEO: Any way, I’m off to get dinner. SEE you!

[He exits.]

DOMINIC: I can’t believe either of them. WHITE people, right?

AMY: Ahem.

DOMINIC: Aww come on you know what I MEAN, baby girl.

AMY: HOME girl.

DOMINIC: HOMIE.

AMY: You know: I really hate it when you do that.

DOMINIC: What?

AMY: Forget I’m white. All because I am a girl.

DOMINIC: You know what I mean.

AMY: Your parents might have raised you to be prejudiced. But that’s no excuse.

DOMINIC: SORRY. Jesus.

AMY: I don’t think you are. But it’s okay.

[She exits. He alone remains.]

DOMINIC: BITCHES.

[He lights a cigarette and smokes privately.]

Dm.A.A.

CANCER MIDHEAVEN: [poem.]

CANCER MIDHEAVEN:

Didn’t your mother ever tell you
You were nothing without the approval
Of the masses? Did you not seek
Your improvement? All the classes
That you took you had to pass and
Only for the Greater Good.

And if you tried to hassle facts in your own favour
Everyone who understood this would prohibit
Your behaviour? So how can you like a knave
Exhibit so depraved and strange of a position?

Well: the sex you crave is just one more
Ambition. Waited twenty-six years you can wait
Some more if you are on a mission.
If they all reject you that’s the damn human
Condition.

So how dare you contradict me
When I condescend upon you.
Didn’t Mom tell you to treat your
Betters with respect. How come you
Have to redirect the blame I found you
Worthy of back in my face?
Your mother surely is ashamed
Of your burly disgrace.

So long you must have waited
To find some one you were fated for.
If she turned you away just like she hated you
Well: you can wait some more.

No other woman here would love you.
Do not be a whore.
Didn’t Mother ever tell you that
Each Monday morning that she had to shove
You out the door?

Didn’t any body tell you
That you are a parasite
If you do things just the way you want to
And you do not DO THEM RIGHT?

How dare you criticise or analyse me
From that lesser place?
When you were the transgressor
And I told it to your face.

YOU now have to answer
You’re the CANCER in your mother’s throat.
YOU don’t get to dance around and YOU
Don’t get a FUCKING VOTE.

When you tuck in tonight
With some infernal whore you met
I wonder if she makes you sore
And if what’s more that you forget

You had to score her telling her about your
Childhood: all the books and the wild
Places you never were allowed to see
The paths you never took.

You had to put them off
But never to procrastinate
I scoff at you now that you’re
Knodding off and you accrue
All of my hate…

Tell her about what a great child you were
You never once rebelled for you knew that
Rebellion was selfish and the kids would
Go to hell.

The world had gone to hell
And you were born and raised just to redeem it
Didn’t Mother tell you? No. Then SURELY YOU
MUST DREAM IT!!

Didn’t any body tell you:
Our society depends upon
The sternest of propriety
The fiercest loyalty of friends?

And no one would ever love you
If you sought your solitary ends
But goodness waits above for those who
Never followed crooked trends.

That the hollowness you feel
Would be promptly satiated
But you had to come to terms with
What was real and what was fated.

That you strove for the ideal
Even if striving you had hated.
Don’t you dare now fucking steal
The time invested on your plate and

Don’t compare me to a character
Who seeks things of his own accord.
I’ve found you to be guilty and I will
Not be condemned until this Order is
Restored.

And so my order is the same:
You do not get a vote until you’ve
Cleared your name and OH:
THE SHAME.

We are not all the same.

And if you see some insubordination
In a maiden’s eye. Then you must TAKE
JUST WHAT IS DUE TO YOU.
To pardon her mistake she’ll have
To die. And is this NEW to you?

No. Don’t you even try.
To tell me that you didn’t try to screw
Me with this alibi.

I’ve added all the facts together
I have found the time.
And I understand. And I see through this
Wretched paradigm.

Chaos and debauchery.
Sodomy and sins.
This is what philosophy will end in:
Where all morality begins.

Didn’t Mother ever tell you
When someone talks down to you?
To humble yourself like the worthless
Father that you never knew?

If you cleverly avoid me
All your personhood destroyed will be
Was your boyhood not just preparation
For your adult life? Where do you have to run to
When the outer world is torn with strife?

Forlorn without a wife to shelter you
Now from the storm. AT least you can
Continue to defy the deviant and social
Norm.

But think not that you do this
For yourself and for your rights.
If you manage to get through this,
It will be because we need you

To fight on again and yet again
In every fading fight…
This is what the World will ask of you
Through those who feed you.

If you want to breed, too
You will find a light somewhere
Out in the dark.

But beware and do prepare
To promptly disembark.

For the lark will only now accept
The hero who is fervent.
If you zero in on some one
Don’t presume that you deserve it.

Sex will only come to those who
Are ready to raise a family.
And next to that no one will stand
We will not tolerate calamity.

Now what will you produce
Now to seduce this woman
That you court?
You had only to show her you
Are of a Noble sort.

No one cares about your childhood fantasies
They’re all the same as all the rest.
What matters: your geometry
Geography. Geology.
What matters is you prove to be

THE BEST! AT ALL YOU DO!

For that was what your childhood was.
Or are you, fiendish deviant, not
only stupid? are you

SPOILED

Too?

Dm.A.A.

Last Letter to R.A.R.:

RAFAEL:

You seem to have forgotten the debt you owe to me. Per chance your injury robbed you of common sense, so I shall be your stand-in conscience once more:

There is no way to pardon the offense to me. All you can do to salvage your well-being is to return to me my belongings or some just compensation for them. I need not threaten you with slander. The Truth would suffice.

You and Daniel broke sacred rules when you violated the Team. Not only was I put in the uncomfortable posture of having to keep your hedonistic insubordination a secret. I ALL so had to bear the humiliating PHYSICAL discomfort of sleeping on your bare floor, cleaning your home in expectation of an event that never happened, spending a sleepless night on your couch (of which I say lightly that it was "yours") and FINALLY when I BEGGED you not to depart the tournament without first consulting the coaches, knowing that it was in your best interest, for I have never operated out of SELF-interest but out of the COLLECTIVE GOOD, I had to watch you turn away from me (and from YOUNG DEBATERS who NEEDED me!!) in blatant disrespect, REFUSING your role as driver. I never received formal thanks for the warning, for which you still owe me, for you will remember that you endangered the entire team with your antics, whereas I remained blameless. Instead you pretended towards an illusory victimhood upon the very stage that I had brought you to, and I know not HOW you found the NERVE to say that any one has ever taken advantage of you when you literally had two houses, both of which we cleaned for free and under false pretenses, you were only supposed to serve the TEAM that we had ALL committed to, (and we would not have relied upon you had we known you were untrustworthy, but you refused to communicate such logistics openly to the team and even held such transparency AGAINST me) and one last thing: YOU DON'T MATTER. LITERALLY you have done NOTHING in this life to earn the respect of your fellows; it has all been a complete fuck-up on every level -- diplomatic, bureaucratic, and FUNDAMENTALLY in the consistency of your obvious motives with your spoken ethics.

SO RETURN TO ME MY SUITCASE. I will not ask you, with such consideration, again. I alone of the three of us remained entirely blameless and transparent and you have only acted as a leech. Cease to displace your guilt upon me now that you are found out. And by the way: I know for a FACT that you had TWO SOFAS. I probably had to CLEAN one of them, bitch.

Dm.A.A.

Tale of Cleansing:

You don’t think I’ve figured you out all ready?

At first I thought that may be it was just an attack upon my pride. But then I simply let my mind rest. It is all ways exhausted after I spend any time around you. You drain its energy, and rarely do I get it back. And promptly it becomes drained again!

It was not my PRIDE that you attacked, but simply my skepticism. In turn, my SKEPTICISM is an attack upon YOUR pride, apparently, and wherefore except that you mean to supplant my REASONING and your ego is bruised when you fail? At that point, your passive aggression turns to an uncontrolled, undisciplined outburst. And so it becomes obvious.

The most ridiculous of your devices is the attempt to employ GUILT. THIS is the reason that I can never pardon you. You pretend towards the victimhood of your own victims, so that they project their own self-image as victim upon YOU! This theft is impermissible. You exploit the conscience of your hosts in such a way that were I less clever or more compassionate I would do something TRULY worthy of Shame just to fight off a Guilt that is entirely secondary to reality!

So think not to condemn me ever again. It is obvious that such a game of zero-sum as you portray the World to be is little more than a parasite’s worldview, and that your fruitless leveling is simply part of the EROSION that is your function to perpetuate.

You do not build. You only destroy.

I KNOW that Alanna never slept again with Kresten.

You expect me to believe otherwise, even as you admitted to self-identification with a narcissistic manipulator? Even as your own PSYCHE STANDS AS EVIDENCE to the fact that you had FRAMED SOME ONE? And who might that be, if not a BLONDE WOMAN who was in pursuit of the TRUTH and in whom you had all ways SEEN YOURSELF and UPON WHOM you had chosen to displace your OWN WEAKNESSES?

Enough.

I shall not do Alanna any more harm by believing your story.

And you will sleep in the bed you made.

I only let you sleep in the bed my parents made for you ONCE.

That was enough to produce my vision. And apparently I was not alone visited. I had managed to EXTRACT the Truth from you, for you in your narcissistic egoism had not yet even REALISED what that dream said of your OWN CONSCIENCE.

You dealt a death-blow unto your SELF when your anger betrayed you, just as it had in the Dream! And one would think that you would heed a last, DESPERATE Warning from the very person that you had NOT to piss off, for he was IN THE DREAM ITSELF your only refuge!

But such is the severity of your egoism.

Hence I cannot allow it any more.

Your anger betrayed you when you let it justify the LIE for which you can never provide evidence. Were there any SEMBLANCE of conceivable truth in that lie, it does not belong to you. Your devices are unfit for it.

How can you be so stupid as to say that you were ANGRY and that that was why you lied to me? And then you EXPECT me to believe you that you had been JUSTIFIED in lying? That you’d told the TRUTH, in fact?

You are no Joker. You are not a criminal mastermind. You are but a court fool.

This insults my very Sanity. This insults REASON its self.

You ADMITTED to the lie. You ADMITTED that you had no evidence. And you ADMITTED that your motive was both passionate and banal: Anger at Insulted Pride. I’d made you look bad in front of your friends.

Demand no more generosity from me. Not even by contradicting what I know all ready of you.

You chose to slander Alanna just because you wanted me to feel as angry as YOU were.

Just as you’d chosen to BLAME her for your OWN guilt.

And so you had done to me.

And to D. In your dream.

Sleep in your own bed now.

Dm.A.A.

KEEPING UP WITH THE END TIMES.: INTRO and CHAPTERS I-II.

KEEPING UP WITH THE END TIMES.

Philosophy is the mind’s antidote against manipulation.

Theology serves as the same antidote, but for the SOUL.

INTRODUCTION: THE BODIES OF MASSACRED TREES.

Every day nowadays I’ll wake up to the sound of the most awful noise. It sounds like some beast from an other dimension moaning and groaning: like a wheezing monster but electronic, wailing at irregular intervals. Its voice colours what few dreams I can remember upon waking, and it continues to follow me as I take my dog out on his mo(u)rning walk. And I know what it is, as I witness the wreckage it has left in its wake:

It’s the Mexicans. To be specific: the ones who wave abjectly at me, smiling feebly but with self-satisfied enthusiasm, as I carry Pumpkin home in the heat. These are the “salt of the earth”, the hard-working people that Donald Trump uses as his fencepost to hide behind the liberal onslaught of criticism. You see: a rational businessman like Donald cannot be troubled with such absurd superstitions such as “race” and “racism”, so to pacify his aggressors he insists that he just absolutely LOVES Mexican Americans; he just dislikes the few who are rapists and drug pushers.

Unfortunately for them, there is still ONE pale-faced man who hates them in this neighbourhood. And that is me. But I hate them not for the reasons ascribed to Donald Trump, reasons which cannot exist because they are so insensible, and the only way that one can even make such an accusation is to be possessed of the same neurosis, for what else then would “racist” mean? What does “racist” constitute? I know not. It takes one to know one(, I suppose).

No: my reasons are precisely those that the Donald uses as his Trump Card (heh.): That they are HARD-WORKING AMERICANS. There was a time that “working for the MAN” (In THIS generation, it’s easy to see who the “man” is, considering both the notorious “1%” statistic and the fact that our President of the Executive Branch is a Corporate Executive*) was deplored by the community. The only reason that such a sentiment faded over the past fifty years is that the counter-culture was so PASSIVE in all that it did. Only a few radicals managed to preserve their memory in the collective mind of generation after generation of L.S.D. consumers. Most of the sages of the Hippie Generation were forgotten. Charles Reich wrote a book once on the three stages in the development of the American Psyche: We began as rugged individualists, became bureaucratic neo-Liberals in a Kafkaesque Corporate State, and finally completed our metamorphosis at the turn of the nineteen-sixties.

So what went wrong? Did we relapse?

*Mussolini said that Fascism is properly described as a merger of Corporate and State Power.

On the contrary: we came down from the high. Our consciousness as a nation SPIKED during the nineteen-sixties, and ever since then it has suffered a radical decline. We did not fall BACKWARDS into our old ways, though our politicians still try to sell those ways unto us. (Bernie was alone of all the candidates in 2016 to represent the Hippie Dream; Ms. Clinton was a total personification of bureaucratic liberalism and Mr. Trump is of course the rugged individualist who wants to bring us back to the OLD DAYS.) We fell FORWARDS, from that precarious peak, into what I call the AGE OF COMPLACENCY. Since the hippies allowed their children to do whatever they wanted, (the expression “militant hippie” became an oxymoron) given that most of those children probably never knew their fathers, the Corporate State survived and learned to USE the very instruments of the counter-culture – drugs and liberal rhetoric – to buy the loyalty of Generation X.

BUT WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MEXICANS, YOU MIGHT ASK?

Every day I hear self-righteous neo-liberals championing the rights of human causes, be it Syrian or “Queer”. (one would do well to remember that these two groups, left to their own devices, would probably be irreconcilable; a tolerant* Syrian is a Syrian-American, and that we are as eager to convert them both abroad and at home to Our Cause as THEY are to enjoy Our Resources does not make us any less imperialistic and stupid.)

*Keep in mind that this is to the Syrians’ credit. As G.K. Chesteron said: Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.

BUT WHAT ABOUT HARAMBE??

CHAPTER ONE: THE DEATH OF A GORILLA WARRIOR.

An ape was shot to death for the crime of being EXACTLY WHERE HE NEEDED TO BE (where he was PUT, technically, for our Education and our Entertainment: The ZOO.), which all so was the WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME, all because of the human-centred PARANOIA of a trigger-happy Zookeeper.

I had to stifle my disgust as I walked through my neighbourhood, a middle-class suburb that had become emaciated of its imported vegetation (as though San Diego had not enough DESERT) and littered with the seemingly bloody stumps of its gorgeous trees. As Treebeard had said: many of these trees were my friends. I had climbed them, hidden behind them, given them names and yes: hugged them. Don’t knock it until you try it.

And all the while I marveled at Saruman’s way with words. For there was no RIOT or PROTEST in defense of our innocent cousin Harambe. Our PRIDE in our HUMANITY had isolated ourselves successfully from such creatures, to such a degree that we could even think to justify ourselves against our captives in the self-defense of our children.

And I do not use “PRIDE” incidentally…

There was a friend of mine who had a cyst on his brain which was ostensibly the result of having taken a bad vaccine. He had grown up a social justice advocate, a minority of a minority in a society whose principle [sic] concerns were the accommodation of gangsters and sexual deviants. So when I received word from him about stopping the violence in Florida, I only wondered: Was Harambe in Florida? Funny. I thought it was Cincinatti.

But alas! Harambe had all ready been forgotten, doomed to surface in later years as one of a number of gorilla memes. (Not to be confused with “guerilla memes”, as in guerilla warfare.) For now the nation had a tragedy that we could ALL agree upon: a considerable group of sodomites were shot to death at a locale that they had all VOLUNTARILY chosen to frequent with the intent of CELEBRATING AND PERPETUATING SODOMY.

This was not perpetrated by a proprietor of the establishment. Nor were they kept captive there for OUR heterosexual amusement.

Though that would have been hot.

They were not attacking our infant children. Though the argument can be made that they were part of a movement that, via a series of Kafkaesque turns, supported the right for a woman to commit infanticide. (I shall elaborate upon that later.)

Secretly my heart was happy. FINALLY: human beings would pay for their vanity in how they treat non-humans. Perhaps THIS bold and daring act of war upon the Emotivist Agenda (again: I’ll explain later; there are only so many times I can digress and only so many tracks to any one mind) would finally send a message. The message: LOOK WHAT WE HAVE BROUGHT UPON OURSELVES. PRAISE HARAMBE, LORD OF THE APES!!

But alas. Truth was thwarted again.

Having had a crush on her for some time since I heard a remix of her song with Lil Wayne, I decided to pay visit to the Google replica of a certain R & B and pop singer. I found a post that decried the “evil” of “some people”. And I only wondered, as any sensible person would: does she mean to suggest that the shooters were evil? Or the homosexuals?

I never learned.

I suppose that it would seem barbaric to suggest that I identify more with apes than with bears. After all: bears were the first animal to be worshipped. But APES are quite probably our very own kin!

My defense is: who are you to claim the assassination of an APE to be a matter of dispute, subject to the Ethic of Ambiguity (PATIENCE: All shall be explained. Don’t you trust me?) in regards to the trigger-puller, but the murder of a BEAR (and other homosexuals) as Absolute? It all ways bugged me to see people who would seamlessly transition from Absolute to Relative statements, in defiance of logic, but to the applause of their self-interested and dim-witted peers. I would later find the words for such court fools and their equally foolish audience: MANIPULATORS.

SOMEHOW the world had been duped to trivialize Harambe’s death even MORE after the faggots were burned. And it became obvious to me where the offense emanated from. It is the source of all offense, for it is at the root of all neurotic egoism. That alone was attacked, not the intrinsic integrity of life. And this attitude that was bruised has all ways been regarded as sin, by all the world’s religions, for it was in fact in no way distinct from its corollary, Shame:

PRIDE.

CHAPTER TWO: WHAT THIS HAS TO DO WITH MEXICANS.

You might have all ready figured it out.

The context clues should have stuck out to your eyes as though they were sticks jammed in through your sockets.

But perhaps the logs in your eyes make it hard to see past the sawdust in mine.

I will dispense with the patronizing rhetorical questions and cut to the chase:

The “hard-working” Mexican Americans who Donald Trump praises to win over the Left are participating the brutal assassination of trees: great spirits that have been made captive in the way that Harambe was: for our human-centred amusement.

Neither neo-liberals nor neo-conservatives care about this. Neo-conservatives would go so far as to lay ruin to the world’s forests just as soon as we can artificially synthesize enough oxygen without the help of the trees.

And the neo-liberals are probably going to be the ones to fund this artificial synthesis, just as soon as they can lessen our carbon dioxide emissions. See: they don’t want to give the plants some thing to breathe EITHER.

(You’ll have to pardon me though as I return to my pedantic ways:)

But WHY DO TREES REALLY MATTER?

There once lived a visual poet named Vincent van Gogh. This painter was imprisoned for his visionary deviance at a sanitarium in France, where he painted the painting that we now call Starry, Starry Night. When asked about why the trees in the painting looked like monoliths in the Tomb of King Ramses, Vince replied simply that one day the trees would reach the heavens. He believed that all EARTHLY things have a teleological PURPOSE that lends an INTRINSIC VALUE to their lives, justifying our maternal, nurturing sympathies: and that is to reach the HEAVENS.

He was not alone in this sentiment.

As recently as in the nineteen-nineties A.D, Britons organized to protest the barbaric murder of trees by corporations on their continent. The footage can still be found on YouTube, under the guise of various I.D.M. artists.

OBSERVE HOW THE BRITS DO IT.

Not bad for a bunch of redcoats, eh?

Trees, to human beings, have all ways been more than just the lungs of this planet. They were friends, lodgings, support systems both physically and emotionally. As a Thou, rather than as an It, a tree is like an other person. And a person is more than just a means to an end.

JUST FOR EXAMPLE:

But most importantly perhaps is that trees REPRESENT some thing, even in the mode of Objectivity (as “Things”) as opposed to Relationship (as People). And that is what van Gogh explained: The striving for all EARTHLY things to reach the HEAVENS. Without this goal life becomes meaningless, and therefore it is expendable, and the instinct to survive turns in on its self under the weight of the civilized mind that notes the futility of such survival even as a success. So the will to survive becomes either suicidal self-destruction, misguided rage, or – worst of all – the seeds of Fascism, whereby a group perpetuates its survival through a collective suicide on the individual level, surrendering all individuality to the WILL OF THE COLLECTIVE, a collective that is INCOMPLETE because it is at the EXPENSE of an OUT-GROUP that is presumed (often rightly) to be fighting to perpetuate ITS OWN survival-as-group.

TIMBER. How we’ve fallen…

Dm.A.A.