Nonfiction

if you see the theme here of searching for gxd, congratulations you're not blind and you can see the obvious. if you notice that I am cynical, jaded, and sarcastic, congratulations you can read my tone of voice and I did something correctly when I am writing this. if you notice my criticism of certain methods, note that it is not a personal attack on the people who follow those, but a search that for myself has lead to a different way.

have a relationship with a gxd of your own understanding, they say. then they dictate that this gxd of your own understanding must be caring and kind and have the best of intentions for you, and thus must be all-powerful.

get closer to this gxd through meditation and prayer and call it a spiritual awakening and join in the violence that proselytising beliefs to others has been since time immemorial; claim to them that if only they do what they do, then they will get what you have.

how am I supposed to have a relationship with something that I by definition cannot understand? how am I supposed to believe that what they believe is remotely possible, when I look out at the world and all I see is death and war and woe. if anything, these are the things that make me certain that there is no caring and compassionate, all-knowing, all-powerful gxd. if there were then we would not have genocide, baseless hatreds, murder, self-harm, sexual assault, and war; the list of crimes and sins goes on, but if there were a gxd that they claim then none of those need ever happen to people.

and then they answer with some sort of mock-profound bullshit that their higher power only gives people those sort of challenges to make them stronger; I cannot believe that something which does that cares about the hundreds of thousands who are then not strong enough, and if it does not care about them, then it probably doesn't care about me either. any gxd that gives people those sorts of harms and hurts is not some-thing that I want to believe in in the first place; if I believe that they believe it is only that I believe they are delusional and incapable of admitting that in reality there are horrible people in the world who use that same gxd to justify awful acts on both the micro and the macro scales.

the closer I look the less that I want any-thing to do with it.

#Addiction #AddictionRecovery #Agnostic #Agnosticism #God #Gxd #Nonfiction #Recovery #Sober #SoberAsFuck #WeDoRecover #XA

the new year, just another day, enthralls the masses with its promise of being special. with its promise of rebirth and renewal.

but what people don't understand is that no promise comes unless you work for it, and all magic comes with a price.

if only they would be willing to pay.

#DailyLife #Disclaimer #Funhouse #Nonfiction #Prose #WhateverThisIs

in 2020 I said the most meaningful two words I will ever say in my life to the most amazing person on the planet.

we went up Highway 1 and parked in the shade of a boulder sheltering the dirt cut-out, back seats folded down and the tailgate up, and then back into the front seats because it turns out those are much more comfortable, and fed each other sushi that we had picked up along the way, just being in the moment.

despite the rest of the world already being on fire, despite the hardship it took us to get to that point in time or any of what was to follow.

that moment was perfect.

and the moment in the morning when I first wake up, whether it is them waking me or me waking them or our cat waking both of us by walking on or biting at faces impatiently, whenever in the day that morning ends up happening and the first thing I remember before I even say a prayer is saying those two words, and I repeat them in my head, sometimes aloud buried into their back, their neck right where it meets their shoulders, their cheek, their ear, the top of their head.

that if I were given a chance I would do it all over again, because I love them and I love my life, our life, with them.

and that first moment of the day is still perfect.

#Goals #InLove #Love #Married #MarriedLife #MarriedLifeGoals #Nonfiction #Prose

at one-fifteen in the morning, after the cat has played at getting up on the desk all night, after I have spent a day working on the wrong assignment, the one which I had the inclination to do rather than the one with the impending doom—I mean deadline.

I wonder what it is that I'm doing that's actually working, even though the numbers haven't lied, not yet.

we'll see if that holds true, with the brief break in the running up to Thursday, and continuation the day or two after. if I'm right, the numbers go back down in the break, and it really is something I'm doing that's working even if finding out involves temporary misery.

but what it is, or in what combination, I don't think I'll ever know.

#DailyLife #Golem #Life #Nonfiction #Prose #TheInvestigator #TheTruth #WhateverThisIs

we're learning about facilitating groups this semester.

and I have never felt so alone.

#Alive #Funhouse #Golem #Nonfiction #Personal #StillAlive #TheMoon #TheInvestigator #TheTruth

don't touch your eyes with your hands after cutting green onions. doesn't matter how many times you washed them in between.

you're still going to feel it.

last week Monday, class was cancelled by a post, not even the related blue paper taped to the door of the classroom to inform those of us who missed the post. today, I thought, just for a moment, to make that check on the canvas where the class is set out and set into modules and sections.

this week it will be on zoom, it tells me.

on Tuesday, it was supposed to end here, but when here is suddenly an hour earlier and everything else arranged stays the same it's easier to cancel the plans, even if one of them then implodes.

this is the sixty-sixth March, in a repeating loop of March over and over and over again. to most people the notion of people as little boxes on the screen has ceased to be something novel; for me I still have difficulty taking that final leap of logic whereupon I can acknowledge the humanity represented by that tiny box with a photograph or a generic silhouette.

tomorrow will be March and the day after that will be March and they day after that yet.

I wish my classmates would mute themselves.

I wish they would turn their cameras off.

and in person they are almost hyper-social, commingling with one another amongst a sea of chatter so high keyed it overflows the container that they are in. if they cannot quiet this container then how are they ever supposed to be able to create one where there is safety, for them and for the vulnerable on the other side of the table. remember to wipe down the cutting board or everything you use it for next is just going to smell and taste like green onions.

it.

the little squares on the screen aren't people, for all that they speak with peoples' voices and hear with peoples' ears and desire with peoples' hearts. there is some perverse amount of freedom found in being not—

#Alive #AmWriting #Covid19 #DailyLife #Funhouse #March #Nonfiction #Pandemic #StillAlive #TheTruth #WhateverThisIs

the sky is hazy between the smog and the smoke; so bright the sun pulsating white hot. it's been on fire longer than we've been alive. fire so hot that it would absolutely incinerate us, made palatable by distance and atmosphere.

the river runs northward underneath the moonlight, against gravity, against the polar minimum as if the moon does not pull back and forth on the oceans to beat them out on the shores.

the picket fence is twined over with plants that do not grow; leaves that turned brown and brittle—in the resting relative peace of restive twilight—petals turned to dust, as if they had never existed in the first place.

you find it's like a fun-house mirror at times, where you can press your fingers to the glass and see in it your own reflections, and then it diverges, reopening old wounds and winding back time—back and back and back and back and back and back and back—until that fence had not been built. so far that the fence was never even thought of; where the fence stands instead was demarcated by the boundary of the lawn, if you could call it that, turned over from Bermuda grass and the last few leaves of the clover that prevent the little hill from just sliding away into nothingness and then its abrupt end where dusty topsoil is raked overturned to dry ashes for sunsoil.

the rabbi Yehuda Amichai says that:

From the place where we are right Flowers will never grow In the spring.

and that:

The place where we are right Is hard and trampled Like a yard.

it makes clear there is no right here, to be found. there is no easy answer from the mirror; your mirror will never tell you what to do. choice and motivation has to come from within—if you use the motivation from without it will eventually cease—and change from that motivation rather than to please.

there is no easy answer, no direction left to go.

But doubts and loves Dig up the world Like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place Where the ruined House once stood.

our houses, our safety, are melted away into the aether, northward into the river that carries us; no easy answer gives us escape from the northbound waters, the only direction left to go is down. when it releases you spit out of the fun-house, no longer in the circus but the middle of the roar of an intersection that should be an interchange, as if you are Frogger and must cross to safety surrounded by all the words that make you small, darting between cars and under wheels.

remember—none of it matters at the end of the night.

when the morning comes, the sky is hazy between the smog and the smoke.

#Astral #Disclaimer #Funhouse #God #Gxd #Jewish #Jewishness #Mazeldon #Nonfiction #TheTruth #TheInvestigator #YehudaAmichai