big ticket

The world goes on in snips and snails and shock and awe, endless iterations of the same old song. Layers of puzzles solved by the primal forces and the ancient multitudes broken by heedless half-smart apes, dizzy with hubris and fantasy as they devour their children like Cronus without the ipecac. Disease and war and our bafflingly empowered idiots, these grifters, thieves, and rapists that continue to plunder and subjugate as we cheer and yawn. The magic will outlast us, however long we endure. But big pictures make for cold comforts once the engines of the transitory begin to grind. 

We are more than the names we wear and the faces we make. We are more than our jobs and our homes and our families. We are the numbers and we are the words, we are the animals that arose from the boiling oceans and the poisonous skies, the pieces put together by the titan of time nigh eternal, the breath that brought the gods to life. Dirt and blood, sea and skin, the flesh assembled from grass and spark. We are legion, the latest shape spat from our busy earth. We are the path unfolding in proteins and prose, making up destiny as we go. 

I live in the margins and the mystery, a fool and minor pariah, trapped in random actions, animal patterns, and half-chosen consequences. I survive by resigned obligations and kindly strangers, habits and rituals, and yes ands and no buts. Some of us just fail to live up to our incarnations, but all of us are trapped in these stories spun for so long they seem true— the impossibility of change, the righteousness of cruel cultural amalgams that are worn exclusively to bind and blind us, that money talking isn’t the greatest bullshit to ever walk through our thick monkey skulls. The heart is made of preposterous stuff, meat and lightning and the entangled attachment to the continuity. Love and compassion, generosity and cooperation— these are the truths highjacked by all our greedy little kings. The heart is a big ticket item that must be given freely. The grace more than beating blood, our legacy more that grief and gelt.