Deprogramming Awareness or The Other Way Around...

Early childhood indoctrination in action. It's often why, as adults, we do what we do. But I'm not just targeting Christians here. An Atheist friend said that he hadn't pushed his teenage daughter one way or the other when she declared her own Atheism. After he thought about it, he recanted. We all lead by example, good or bad. The mother of a friend smoked, drank, and slept with whomever, all the wile shaking her finger at her daughter telling her not to smoke, drink, and sleep around. Guess what the results were?

Of course it's up to each of us to lead by example for our kids and everyone else, mainly for ourselves. It's all about the person in the mirror. Certainly that's true when it comes to personal responsibility. We choose our reaction. No one “makes me mad” I may choose to react with anger, but that's on me. No scapegoating. 

My father taught me the most valuable lesson I've ever learned. “Question everything.” he said, “The teacher, priest, lawyer, doctor, everyone and everything, including me.” We must take nothing for granted, step back and run it through your own private obstacle course. Choose those things that make sense for us personally,and stand up for them. Be flexible though. The one absolute we can count on while making this journey, is that everything will, and is, changing. 

Storm!

A wicked thunderstorm rolled in late yesterday afternoon. Loud explosions of air clapping against air filled the void left by lighting strikes that hit like God's Gatling gun, spraying the area with chaos. This morning's calm, like a glorious exhaustion after frenzied sex. The cloudless sky, brilliant with sunlight that stings eyes and skin, bringing out peak colors, a crystal clarity, as if the storm peeled off a thin layer of film, dingy and spotted, washing it down into sewers and streams and ultimately, out to sea....

Now, driving home from the gym, Johnny Winter is screaming the blues:

If the river was whiskey and I was a divin

Baby I was a diving duck, whoa

If the river was whiskey and I was a divin Duck

I would dive on the bottom, Baby I would never come up

Well the suns gonna shine in my back door,

Baby in my back door someday

The sun gonna shine in my back door someday

Well the wind gonna blow all

Your blues away

And it did exactly that.

On the Road to Spuds...

Blazing blacktop road to the horizon, melting in the unapologetic sun, flanked by soggy fields sprayed with septic chemicals for too many generations, all banned now and leeched into the local groundwater. Heading West on that burning sauna of a Florida afternoon, radio says it's 101 in the shade, although there is none of that in sight. Just open fields of pale cabbages raised too long on Monsanto chemicals, slowly killing the earth, even as the crops try to grow. Heat snakes undulate skyward, blurring the horizon, dancing in mirage pools that evaporate into the searing oven with my approach. A shape on the side of the road ahead, at first fuzzy, unfocused, sharpens in flashes until I see him clearly. Dirty, stooped, dragging a piece of airline luggage like an errant child, jumping and bucking with a broken wheel. His back to oncoming traffic, the acknowledgment of his left thumb turned slightly outward with my approach, barely visible. An appeal, a question already answered by his hunched, defeated shuffle. He was heading the right way, walking hand in hand with a thousand miles of hopelessness, toward a little farm town that no longer had anything left to offer, as sick and toxic as the water that ran through its veins.