So I’ve had a couple of e-mails about my last entry saying that Christians are evil.

Well… I was just listening to a conservative commentator on public media explaining that all non-Christians are going to hell, period, no matter how good they are — and that all it takes to go to heaven is a belief in Christ, no matter how bad you are, because you don’t have to be perfect to be saved, you only have to be a sincere believer.

So… According to this particular religious leader, in hell one finds Ghandi, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Buddha, every one of the Lamas (remember, Christians don’t believe in reincarnation), Muhammad, Sartre, John Lennon, Hobbes, Voltaire, Hume, Paine, Percy Shelley, Darwin, Lincoln, Marx, Andrew Carnegie, Edison, Freud, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemmingway, Langston Hughes, Albert Camus, Richard Feynman, Frank Zappa, Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei and the other great poets, Confucious, Benjamin Franklin, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt and the other great chiefs too numerous to mention, and two of my grandparents — and all of this just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are some worthy names in heaven as well, but at least it sounds like I could find some agreeable company in hell without too much trouble.

Meanwhile, our number one evil in history, Herr Hitler, will apparently be found in heaven. That’s a big black eye for heaven, as far as I’m concerned. Pair him off with an army of crusaiders and KKK members and in spite of how great God and Jesus-boy might be, I think I still prefer to go hang out in hell with the crowd I mentioned earlier, thanks.

In fact, I’d venture to say that anyone who actually wants to go to heaven and hang around with the likes of Vlad the Impaler and Bloody Mary (forgetting, for a moment, our dear Adolf) is probably not a very moral person. Okay, so I’ll admit, we down in hell will have Josef, but… on balance, I think the list of crusaiders and Nazis probably does heaven one better. And anyway, we get both Anne Frank and the now famous Oskar Schindler, as well as Leon Trotsky, so we hellians keep the moral high ground regardless.

So… you bloody uppity Christians… Go to heaven!

Republicans are evil. Christians are evil. The military-industrial complex is evil. Capitalism is evil. America is evil. Down with them all, down with them all! Power to the everyman! My generation: let’s unite under the humanitarian flag and smash all of the old orders! Will we ever manage to unbind the world from this shit?

Ten years have gone.

I will never, ever, ever, ever grow up. The search for magic, the lust for magic is endless and I will never sacrifice it. I remember and I see. I remember and I see.

…and when the tide comes in
to purify my longing, as it once did yours —
I will know that I am home.

The face of danger in the 21st century has now been revealed, and it is truly terrifying. Americans are on the verge of living in an expansionist military dictatorship which seeks nothing less than global rule. The most shocking thing of all is that we no longer even seek to disguise it.

Those of you about to e-mail me with a lot of static… have you read the document? This new “Bush Doctrine” as it is being called basically says:

We will attack whomever we want, whenever we want to — without asking anyone. Furthermore, we plan to spend, on an ongoing basis, as much as is necessary to have more and better weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, than any other nation on the planet — in order to preserve our ability to attack whomever we want, whenever we want to — with impunity!

It is the arms race of the Cold War reinstated and coupled with a first strike policy — with suitably vague criteria for first strike decisions that any presidential whim could potentially be considered adequate cause. Watch congress over the coming weeks, folks, because they’re all that stands between us and disaster. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has managed to force the issue just before an election in a society still dominated by fears about terrorism — it is a politically brilliant power play by a very hungry administration. And it is scary.

The world as we know it may be over. The United Nations has been undermined, the moral high ground has been lost (as though we ever had it); the final great superpower has just announced that it has both the means and the will to control the entire globe, from top to bottom.

Let World War III, the War of Civilizations, begin.

I know what I am capable of. I have seen it and continue to catch fragments and fleeting glimpses when I least expect it… the familiar old genius is there, hidden somewhere… but I can’t help but feel that in the midst of becoming I am fighting myself every inch of the way. Will I ever reach the plateau that I am meant to reach, or will I simply lay down in the valley below and try to wish it all away?

“And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing.”

Epilogue:

I love television. It relentlessly shows me all of the things I can’t possibly stomach.

You know those songs that you can’t listen to because they absolutely make you die each time you hear them… those songs that make you hurt so bad you don’t know if you’ll make it until morning? The ones that remind you of that person, or of that place… that is never coming back…

Why is it so hard not to listen to them, over and over again?

The world doesn’t revolve around me?! Of course the world revolves around me! It revolves around every one of us! Whichever dumb fsck said the world doesn’t revolve around me naturally thinks it reolves around him! You are always at the center of your own universe, there is no way around that. It’s the most important part of that whole existential nightmare routine. If it wasn’t true, Dostoevsky would have been an organ-grinding bum instead of a great author.

None of this makes any sense.

It’s early (i.e. less that six) AM and I’m working. That’s the very definition of dedication. I’m dedicated. I’m patting myself on the back. (pat. pat… pat.)

If I were forced to select a ‘greatest song of all time,’ I would have to give serious consideration to Led Zeppelin’s Rain Song as the ultimate and essential victor… Seldom has such a beautiful and poignant piece of music been written, either by the classical composers or the modern ones.

I turned on the window fan and pressed my face against the screen and looked out the window into the darkness and I felt… the cold air, the blanket that surrounds the Earth… and I wanted to badly to join, to be a part of it… to reach out and touch that which is elemental, pure… But I can’t do it any longer. I don’t know where my creative self has gone. Sometimes lately I feel as though I’ve found it, but sometimes I feel as though my voice is still buried somewhere deep inside me, lost after years of ‘adulthood’…

All I know is that the autumn nights, already upon us, are too beautiful for words… I can’t help but cry silently, not knowing what to wish for…

Relief. I have been paid. This increases my ability to get work done significantly, since I no longer have to worry about juggling other things.

It has been raining today. It smells like September. I need better camera equipment to capture it. Maybe there is no equipment that can capture it, I don’t know. Probably that’s the case…

I know I’m going to be arrested sooner or later during this War on Terror, because this is exactly the sort of thing I’d say. I’m part eastern. I know exactly how much Americans hate people like me, I grew up dealing with it, getting into fights because of it. And now it’s so much worse! Since 9/11, I’ve been told on three separate occasions, point-blank, that I look like a terrorist. I take that at face value. Obviously, to a lot of white people, I look like a terrorist. I can’t imagine how much worse it must be to actually be from the middle east or to have an Arabic name.

I can just see myself in a situation where some jackass is harassing me and I shoot back with, “Yeah, and it’s a good thing you’re harassing me like this because naturally I’ve got a bomb and if you don’t stop me, I’m going to blow you up in the name of Allah.”

And then of course I’d be in cuffs, getting dragged down the street by the FBI asshole squad while I said under my breath:

“Shit… I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”

I have pulled three all-nighters this week, working all day as well. My total sleep, in hours, for the entire week is probably around nine hours so far. Nine hours since Saturday. On the upside, I have managed to submit quite a lot of material in a reasonably short period of time, at least by my standards. But it has been very tiring.

University was much easier.

This Iraq issue is about as banal as you can get… America wants its own way, America fails to acknowledge the sovereignty of other nations or of the UN, supposedly in order to protect its own soveriegnty, the American public clamors for war because the politburo’s full of oil men and the public’s full of jingoists, America wins initial war easily creating hundred-day-war number two, America experiences a thousand percent increase in terrorist activity from an ever-increasing range of nations and peoples over the ensuing decade.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Stupid, culturally-insensitive, disrespectful, violence-happy, pig-headed, cowboy-lookin’ Americans. Duh. Duh, duh, duh! Somebody give me a big, fat clue bat so that I can smash this GW-lookin’ crowd in the head.

The winds of September are a benediction, the caresses of three thousand souls wanting peace between brothers and peace among men, dreaming and breathing in the swirls of early leaves — a sad but noble essence forever ready to rise again. If we who are left behind forget — if we twist their final transcendence into a longing for war, we’ll have lost them utterly and ourselves as well, yet once more.

Peace to everyone. Peace. It’s a small planet. In spite of our greatest mistakes and offenses, we are and will remain — one.

And then there are those moments when you know that you feel different, but you can’t begin to determine whether it is actually better or worse that you feel. Confusing, confusing, I am not accustomed to moderation in feeling! I don’t quite know what to do with it. Have a cigar, I suppose, and wait for the sensation to go away!

No, no, I take it back… I do know what I feel. It isn’t better or worse, it is that same old feeling, just a little too transcendent for a moment or two. There is no better feeling than vulnerability. There is no worse feeling than vulnerability. There is no more ecstatic feeling than vulnerability. I love the world. The world does not love me. The world will never love me or anyone; the world is blind and driven, innocent and guilty at the same time, poignant but unfeeling. But no matter; the world is lovely anyway.

What did I write once, a long time ago, when I felt like this?

“It all seems very sad. Very, very sad. No wonder it sometimes rains. No wonder the ocean is beautiful…
No wonder people look for God.”

Thank you everyone, for everything. I will try to do my part.

I have been reading yet another bit of preaching about how there is no room for the postmodern thinker within the socialist or communist camps. But I have been recently reminded that the ever-so-discredited Sartre himself became a Marxist in the end, just as Marcel had predicted. And I am willing to become at least as discredited as Sartre.

There are too many talking heads. There are too many people. There is too much love directed at absolutely nothing. It is time to save the world, if only we knew how — if only we could be bothered!

It is raining. It is beautiful. I think this is the first rain I have seen in months, since sometime in the spring… the wind is blowing and the sound of the leaves and the smell of the changing seasons is truly intoxicating. I’d better finish this entry, I’m likely to lose power any moment!