For Richer or for Poorer

     I am not religious. To be honest, most of the people I know aren't very religious. We all have our doubts and we all have some faith. I like that people question our origins, others' principles and each other's actions. I also love so many passages from the Bible, Torah and Koran. I don't want to treat these as works of fictions because of the magnitude so many have placed on these books. To me, all books are sacred. To me, all faith is a miracle.
     I can't get over some of the most beautiful things about religion and I hate that politics are gorging themselves creating factions and hatred between different faiths. Anyone that has actually read any scripture, as long as they have some talent of observation and/or deduction, realize that every scripture of a major religion tells us to love. They tell us destruction is devilish. I don't understand how there are so many who are willing to turn to fear and violence the minute an election year, a ballot, a book comes around where supposedly we must choose or we are no longer the chosen.
     One of the most amazing moments of my life happened when I should have been too young to understand its meaning. My mother, sisters, brother and I had come home from church. I hated church. Roman Catholics...always mourning, except for a few select holidays. My dad would make these amazing omelettes (still one of the hardest words for me to spell other than diarrhea), and other delicious foods while we were off 'worshiping', I may have combined memories, but those omelettes and my father's beliefs have never been able to separate themselves from each other.
     When I was young (perhaps on some Sunday with my face full of brunch) I asked my dad if he believed in God. He told me that if anyone said absolutely there is a God, they might be liars. He also said that if anyone ever said there was no God, they were probably liars too. This taught me always never to say you know something if what you mean to say is that you believe in something. Honestly, I think it's a whole lot more amazing to believe than to know.
     With that said....I could continue with some pretty corny things. Like...I know I'll die but I believe I will live etc. As much as I wish I had fruitful and life changing quips, I think I still have more questions than statements. So let me ask you, person so unfortunate as to be reading this...what do you believe in and what do you know? Which do you prefer?

Merry Christmas Recession! (reposted from FB)

Dear Santa,
I've been pretty good this year and was wondering if you could grant my Christmas wish! See, there was once this guy named Jesus and he was super cool. He was the kinda guy who would sit with the nerds at lunch time in high school cause no one else would. People loved him, but others hated him. They were afraid of his altruism and shining divinity. Kinda like Ghandi but with better hair...Sorry, getting sidetracked! Anyway, this guy Jesus was awesome and people have written and read about him for centuries.


But today I was very much disturbed. I was waiting for a friend to pick me up from Market East (a train station/mall) when a young man started to attack his family! He was screaming about not having enough money for what the very skinny but beautiful lady wanted to buy her kids (who were with her, one by her side, one slung upon her breasts) and that she was a stupid insert swear word.
 But today I was very much disturbed.


Where was Jesus in any of this? The guy was pulled away by security and the lady went back home. Safe for the moment I guess. I know everyone has their attitudinal shortcomings, and some to the extent that they become abusive. But help me Santa, can you please give this world a good will roofie that you mix in with the acid rain? Like maybe all the world could start having positive feelings towards each other and stop acting like pack rats guarding their goods...?

So really that's all I want for the early celebration of the birth of super cool Jesus. I want families to be together, for their bread/protein winners to feel up to the task of at least minimally providing for their families. I know there are a lot of liberals out there that want to be given hand outs left and right and our not a real American but actually a Kenyan Muslim president is trying to act like Robin Hood or something, but if you, Santa, give us the stuff we want, it's okay! Cause you are Santa! You are much better equipped at foreign policy than some dude who went to Harvard. So rev up St. Nick! Help our destitute and depressed, Lord knows Congress won't.

I got laid off. I play a lot of online Scrabble now. What else do you want? A copyright for the next great thing? I'll do my best, but for now....I'm collecting.
    Here's a dream I had the other night. It was sweet.
The world was a little bit different.  People weren't afraid of each other. No stock markets or trading existed. We held familial obligations and that was it. Our parents and children mattered more than our retirement savings. We hosted holiday parties rather than obsess over trading options. We held each other's hand rather than have a hand in each other's holdings. Hmm. I wish.
But here we are now. We obsess. We digress. We believe the greatest income will come in the future, bred from the past. Mostly those I know and grew up with have nothing to gain from our ancestors' death. But I am afraid that the majority of wealth derives from nepotism..Not just familial but obligational. Let's break free of this needy habitat and make our own decisions.

Fireworks.

     I'm from the country. Now I live in the city. It's weird. I'm a country girl. If need be, I'll fight a bear at a moments notice but I cannot deal with crowds. The city is filled with crowds. I won't fight a crowd. They scare me. Spiders, ticks, hicks, trees, fleas, rising rivers and falling economies will not be able to scare me away. However, a mob trying to attain the newest assassin video game will have me running for my life.  Why are we this way?
      Turmoil, strife, crime, grime, terror, fear, gunshots, hopelessness, jail time, neglect, lovelessness. paralysis, poverty, racism, what do you expect from us, from them, from us? I've been held up at gun point, knife point and, oddly enough, pipe point. And did I ever back down? Oh, hell yeah! You don't argue with a 45. I wish I didn't know what a 45 was.
      I wish I didn't know what most of what I just said was. I wish I was naive. I wish I was a dumbass. But I'm smarter now because of what I've been exposed to. I'm a country girl who moved to the city. And if I know anything I know this: We can do so much better for each other. It's easy to explain away the reasons why poverty exists, but try sitting in the bar next to someone who just lost their job and explain it to them. Do you have the guts and ability to explain to them why they can't feed their kids? Maybe it's cause they're drinking. But why are they drinking?
     Try to explain why their lesbian daughter can't get married because despite this man's South Philly upbringing that taught him hate for fags and dykes, for Godsakes he loves his daughter and she loves her girlfriend and they can't get married and that's hideous. His daughter cannot be married because of hate. Love cannot be because of hate. It doesn't make sense.
      There's a whole lot of things we don't talk about. Us middle-class. We have to start talking. Otherwise we will disintegrate. We will lose everything our parents and grandparents have taught us. We will lose everything our grandparents died for. And yes, yes indeed, with the most sorrow and bravery I can muster from my heart, both my grandfathers died for something bigger than bigotry. They died for liberty, but the most important thing is....they lived for love. I only really knew one of them, but I know in my heart what they both lived for, and it was for the people they loved.
      So here we are, and we don't know what to do. At least I don't. I don't want to be a part of a bandwagon that I wouldn't run face first into. I don't feel that there's anything out there for me right now. I don't feel that there's anyone who voices a similar opinion or walks the same path as me, there's no one I feel I can truly believe in. So let's talk. Let's share and be honest with each other, else, I don't know what to do.

Hey, I Got Married!

Hey, it's true! I'm a married lady! People keep asking me how married life is. I often don't know how to respond to this question. It rules! It's totally scary too! I'm sorry, what did you want to hear? Life sucks. Can you believe how awful it is to realize you have to be with the same person you've been with for X amount of years? OH JESUS SAVE ME!!!!
If you choose to be with someone you don't love, I hope Urkel comes back from his syndicated grave and punches you in the head you archaic bastard. If you choose to be with the person who makes you want to be, makes you be and lets you be a better person, hey, ya did the right thing by gettin married!
On another note. I see so many souls bob and weave and ebb and flow out there right now. What's the deal? Why are there so many people that are so unhappy? So you don't have as much money as you did before? Rice is still cheap, vote better. So you can't buy a McMansion, well, peanut butter is still affordable and somewhere somebody still loves you, get over it. America, let's get our heads put on all right and stuff. Or give the land back the the freaking Injins, or whatever you call who we killed to be here. Work harder...File more lawsuits against the awful rich bleep bleepity bleep bleeps or just give up and concede. It is with the heaviest heart that I say, we killed off an entire population, we committed genocide to be here. How easily are you going to give this country up off of those facts. You can trace your ancestry and hope those countries will let you back in, or you can stop being such a jackass and start recognizing what this country needs to heal. Will you?

Older, Younger.

My husband loves Wes Anderson. No, it's okay, I'm cool with it. In fact, I kind of love him for it. Tonight we got Indian takeout and watched Darjeeling Limited and Rushmore. The food wasn't spicy enough, but fortunately, the movies were more poignant than I had remembered. The first time I watched Rushmore, I kinda walked out of the living room and into my bedroom and cried. This is for a very humorous reason. My first boyfriend gave me a mixed tape and I thought it was the greatest coupling of songs in the entire world. I thought him a genius. It took me a really long time to get over him, simply based on that mixed tape, which was actually a CD.
So all the years later I sat down with my roommates to watch Rushmore. Excuse the improper punctuation, I just don't give a damn when I'm telling a story. Distracted, so, I watched Rushmore and sat there in a living room full of people I lived with in rooms, and realized, I realized. This asshole just burnt the soundtrack from Rushmore and gave it to me like he actually spent some time on it!!!!
What kind of person are you who does that? Seriously? How can you pass off you're own emotions as the producing ability of one MARK MOTHERSBAUGH. I didn't date Devo, I dated a dude, yo! Why didn't he even bother to change the arrangements? I mean, Jesus God! This is the twenty first century. It's not like we just discovered how to arrange playlists on recordable cd's! Geeze!!!!
I'm mostly over it. I mean, I do have the greatest man in the world as my husband, it just still upsets me that some people can be so stupid! We are human beings, which in my opinion means we are all crazy. Cause, come on, just like denying the fact a mixed tape or CD or whatever it was was not of your own creation is pretty much the same as denying that every human being is insane.
I love Wes Anderson and I love his movies. They may not be perfect, but they sure remind us of what kind of people we can be and what kind of people we don't ever want to be. And how even if we turn into the kind of people we don't ever want to be, we still have the chance of making it back. I get why my husband loves it, I get why it makes me uncomfortable sometimes. Can we truly be these fictional characters our hearts so want to become, invest in, cry for and archive? Detest, reject, atone for and live for?
All I got from these movies (which I ended crying during I must confess) is that we hope to create characters, always, breath through them, live through them, have a part of them with us everyday. Despite the hypocrisy I see in movies, politics and news....at least there's Chris Mahoney. Oh, and Wes Anderson.

The rider on the mountain

     The east coast doesn't shine the way the west can. Our mountains are older, sunk into the ground from ice ages and further erosion. The peaks of the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas stretch their backbones against thin atmosphere in a way that only those who have seen them can truly understand. Quartz shimmer, limestone sheds and red rock stains. They all come together to the geologist's delight.
      I was very young when I first saw them. In a way, that memory keeps me young forever. The buffalo, the elk, the mountain goats, all of them finding a way to survive in a land that seemed like Mars to me. The severity of the slopes seemed inhabitable, yet these great creatures found a way to survive. They found a way to thrive, despite the predators and precarious conditions, they thrived. Shouldn't that be a lesson?
      When I was young I was a fearless little thing. One day we climbed the craggy ledges of these same slopes. I  got my fingertips dirty while digging into the dirt after seeing some shiny thing. It was only quartz, pretty worthless by economic standards. To me, it was like finding gold. Beauty, like time, is relative. The jutting sharp edges of this rock, that I had discovered, gleamed in the unburdened sunlight. In my hands, it seemed like I had found the greatest gem ever uncovered. It was only that way to me.
    The sunlight hit its jagged, haggard edges while it nestled in my palms. The wind whipped and turned my cheeks bright red. The sight from the edge seemed impossibly grand. From way up there, things looked much smaller. Houses looked like specks of dirt. Trees looked like blades of grass. Next to me, the grown-ups spoke of things that couldn't seem to matter to me for at least a decade or so more. So I sat in solemn silence and solace.
     It's been over a decade and I would still rather think of those mountains than think of what the grown-ups speak of. How do we keep the words inside our mind which trigger the youthful and supposedly infinite feelings of hope and brotherhood that we knew....that we knew before we really knew. Before we really knew, just how much it takes to forsake all the pain and anger that come at sea level, when you're most likely to get flooded by the rest of them, of us, of them. Of it. Of it all.
    Like sitting on a teeter totter, we bellow and inhale the seriousness and ridiculousness of existence. It's not important, it's important, it's stupid...it's smart. If this journey was preemptively smooth and beautiful, who would take it? What would be the point? We follow the precarious path despite the danger and find out whether we are quartz or diamond.
     I hope we are all quartz, something someone else left behind not noticing the beauty of it, only hoping to sell. But one day some hands will pick you up and know how beautiful and important you are. Not to the rest of the world, no, but to the hands who hold you, to the sun the sun that hits your jagged, haggard edges, to the slopes that you have been formed upon, to the ages who knows how long it took you to form, and to all the eyes who spy you knowing, that is something beautiful.

What we gain and what we lose

     His hand was withered and weak. His face was wrinkled and his gaze seemed lost in the space between staring and seeing. He couldn't communicate but he could hear and feel like the youth that was his progeny, standing before him, confused at this unfamiliar state of passing. I imagined him reaching up like he was trying to touch my cheek and tell me that everything was alright. None of us wish to imagine the pain our loved ones go through. Everyone lives, everyone dies. This is the predicament created from being evolved and intelligent enough to enjoy life as a human being. This is the predicament created from being evolved and intelligent enough to know that it will end. Redundant, yes, but some things must be constantly repeated to be understood. I still don't understand these things. They terrify and intrigue me. No matter how many times I repeat these facts.
      She was there and then she was gone. No one can make sense of tragedy. I held her hand the night before her hands turned cold. It will never leave my heart and I seldom mention it. Though years have passed since I saw my reflection in that funeral parlor mirror, I will never forget the eyes that stared back into mine.  A young girl asking why. And now and almost two decades older,  I am still asking that question. I study physiology, I study anatomy, religion and spirituality, poetry, prose and history. I still don't understand. I am not stupid but I still don't understand. I saw her blonde roots growing through her dyed black hair.
     I remember my grandfather before he passed. I remember him before he got sick. Strong as an ox and as stubborn as a mule with a heart that stretched to the moon and back down to Earth. One of the cruelest diseases that could ever overcome a human being took hold of him. It didn't happen quickly, he died slowly, a torturous death that he didn't deserve. Progressive Supranuclear Palsy is a terrible condition which overtakes the nervous system, causing the body's ability to perform vital functions to deteriorate. Not even the worst of humanity should suffer from this disease, yet the best I've ever known lost his life to it.
     I don't know why I dwell. The most forthcoming answer is because I cannot accept what I do not understand. I understand that cells mutate, they deteriorate. I understand that drivers of gigantic machines are human beings and they make mistakes. It doesn't seem to sink in enough to alleviate this sadness. I understand that if every human being that was ever born was immortal that the Earth would not be able to sustain the occupancy. I cannot balance the intellect with the emotion.
      The reason why I'm thinking about this is because I learned of several deaths today. The death of Clarence Clemens is a huge loss to me. To some this may be laughable, but to me it is horrible. Gentle souls such as his should be mourned. Such talent and kindness should be remembered. The other deaths, less famous people but just as important, contain pain in the eyes of their friends and family that I know and cannot forget. Yet, these are the reasons we keep going.
We have each other-family, friends, significant others.
Change is inevitable with the great chance that things will get better.
Every sunrise means an opportunity to do good in this world.
You will learn something new today.
Sandwiches are delicious.
The world is an immense environment with thousands of living beings that act and respond to each other, we get to choose how we act and respond.
Although we lose the ones we loved, we can reflect and be grateful to have had them in our lives at all.
If you are reading this, you are alive, and that means everything. So for God's sake, for everyone's sake, live
and be good to each other. Don't fill life with regrets, fill life with as much happy memories as possible.
There is always that album you can go home and listen to that will lift you up or help you understand. There is always someone you can call who will understand, whether you think they want to listen to your hardships or not, they will. Because that is what we are here for really.
To listen, to change and to be changed, to forgive and to be forgiven.
To love and to be loved.
To go on, with the memories of those we have lost. No matter how painful they may be in remembrance, they are joyous in their existence.
To everyone who is grieving, at least you have someone or something to grieve for. To everyone who is celebrating, do not become callous to joy, no matter what. To everyone who is stuck, get out, get up, get ready. We have life. We are alive. We are living. And we must remember this fact until we no longer have the privilege to remember anything at all.