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McCain’t

by Hosho McCreesh

"The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities."
-Joan Didion – ‘Sentimental Journeys’ from After Henry

“What campaigns peddle is not simply character but character as defined by story—a tale of opposing forces that in its telling will memorably establish what a given election is about.”
-Robert Draper - ‘The Making (and Remaking) of McCain’

“The vote is our ticket to the drama, and the politician’s quest to eradicate fill in the blank is no different from the promise of the superstar of the summer movie to subdue the villain—both promise us a diversion for the price of a ticket and a suspension of disbelief.”
-David Mamet – a footnote in ‘Letters of Transit’ from
3 Uses Of The Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

John McCain is compelling.

Not as a potential President (god no, he's insanely ill-fit for that job…no, I'll be voting for his esteemed opponent in the upcoming), but as both a public figure and a private pariah, a man with many a heroic and tragic flaw. Also, and of course, as a train wreck. I am fascinated by John McCain, though less as a candidate than as a story; one we, as Didion might say, “tell ourselves in order to live”, as a narrative thread which might serve as some kind of American parable, fable, or even cautionary tale. But most specifically I am interested in his own story: the one he tells himself, the one not actually written about (though still inescapably alluded to) in Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir. McCain is, to my eye, like watching a Spanish bullfight; a public execution; like watching King Lear's descent into madness—engaging not as much for what has been said (which has been surreal) as much as for what is being done: every bit of it intriguing, yet—ultimately—foredoomed.

With less than a day left in his bid for the presidency, McCain is poised to fulfill the dramatic promises made by not only the singularly coherent (which is to say believable) of his campaign’s narrative threads, but that of his actual life’s story as well: and that is to lose, gloriously. To be clear, this has not been the desired outcome of any of the many, dizzying yarns McCain and his handlers have tried to sell the electorate on…no, no…this is the story they’ve unwittingly brought to its justified, dramatically-earned, and correct end—the one they’ve told instead. The exposition of this great tale was laid down generations earlier and the characterizations—both real and false—have been decades in the making. As has the deep and desperate psychology that drives the man who, even after two national campaigns, remains a stranger for the American voter—a tactic that seems, now, much less accidental. Or, rather, great efforts have been made to mask, control, spin, and bury his political and personal inadequacies; matched only by counter-efforts to fabricate, for the man, a new mythology—one based largely on explaining away the failures in his so-called defining moments, his plot points, his mistakes. Offered, instead, has been a kind of passive alibi—one dressed up as a hero’s journey. Enter: the unbelievable character sketch that McCain currently campaigns as. And make no mistake: it is unbelievable. And the polls suggest that the voters have not fallen for it, have not been fooled by the bait-and-switch, have not—despite McCain’s monumental efforts—agreed to suspend their disbelief such that, once again, McCain might be allowed to succeed in spite of himself.

To hear McCain sell it, it goes something like this: he’s a 3rd generation maverick and serious military man; his rambunctious and unapologetic past behind him, he is now a devoted family man, one unwilling to bend to the pressures (& pleasures) of others; he is the prodigal son returned “with the scars to prove it”—that is prove his individual heroism, and love of God and country.


“My grandfather was a naval aviator, my father a submariner. They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition of my life. They have been dead many years now, yet I still aspire to live my life according to the terms of their approval.”
–John McCain, Faith of my Fathers: A Family Memoir

“My father was an intelligent man, and quite well read as a boy. The low grades as a student cannot be accredited to poor intellect. Rather, I assume they were attributable to his poor discipline, a failing that was almost certainly a result of his immaturity and the insecurity he must have felt as an undersized youth in a rough-and-tumble world that had humbled many older, bigger men.”
–John McCain, Faith of my Fathers: A Family Memoir

As defined by his forefathers, John McCain is a study in contradictions—most specifically in his reportedly lifelong roles. In many ways he is a man just like his father and grandfather—only not, in neither their eyes nor his own, as great. In the aforementioned quotes we find John McCain talking about and admitting to things not of his forefathers’ lives but his own—accidental admissions, I’d say. These are the stories he uses to explain away both his and his forefathers’ imperfections. It is also how he positions himself among their ranks. Some of these things might be true, and I have no doubt that McCain believes most (if not all) of them are. But the fact that his story has been so retroactively constructed, that he is so utterly convinced by the story as to doggedly stick to it even as it, as a political tactic, fails him, suggests something a little more pathological at work. True or not true, McCain needs this story to be his story. And even if this is his story—it’s certainly not his whole story.

I have only the vaguest recollections of McCain's campaign in 2000: what I do remember is liking him; thinking he was a reasonable, & forthcoming potential candidate; thinking that he was far more experienced, & frankly, a vastly superior candidate—one much better suited to the nomination. I also remember watching the GOP brutally cannibalize one of it's own, one of its most loyal (if not a little naïve), in favor of George W. Bush and his disturbing, win-at-all-costs brand of politics. It was not only ugly but felt downright wrong. Crucify Clinton, Gore sure…but one of its own, and a war hero? It set a terrifying and unnatural precedent. In fact, Bush’s brand of politics highlighted exactly why McCain was—in my mind—the better of the two: McCain ran a pretty decent and honorable campaign.

Little did we know that 2000 would be an ugly glimpse into what would come to be known as “politics as usual” in the next 8 years—the eventual cost still too impossible to measure. As a result, America has been a nation divided: by Republican action; by Democratic inaction—a division deeper than we still yet know. To see, in 2008's campaign, such a vastly different man than the one I remember from 2000 has been more than a little alarming. And I cannot be the only one who feels that turning, in 2008, to the very people who so publicly destroyed him is more than a little unnerving. After all, we know it affected him. He strongly considered jumping ship and joining the Democratic party afterwards—something that could at least partially be attributed to that cannibalization he endured. So at what cost…at what cost goes loyalty? Yes, politics (& college football) makes for strange bedfellows—sure, sure. But to willingly ally himself with such political hypocrisy has all but proven that, despite all punditry to the contrary, he cares for only one thing: winning. Though McCain seems to tell himself a wholly different yarn.


2

“The other adviser was 53-year-old Mark Salter, a brilliant, pugnacious writer who has composed all of McCain’s books and major speeches and in a more encompassing sense is McCain’s definer, looking after what Salter himself calls the ‘metanarrative’ of McCain’s transformation from reckless flyboy and P.O.W. to courageous patriot.”
-Robert Draper - ‘The Making (and Remaking) of McCain’

“The search for witches, Jews, un-Americans, homosexuals, immigrants, Catholics, heretics is, similarly, a pageant and not really a political quest at all. The prime movers elect themselves the protagonists, identify what is causing all that unfortunate uncertainty in the world, and swear to expunge it, if we will just vote for them.”
-David Mamet - from ‘Letters of Transit’,
3 Uses Of The Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

As defined by his adviser and ghost-autobiographer Mark Salter, and under the guidance of Rick Davis, and Steve Schmidt, McCain has—as we have witnessed—run a campaign based largely on fear. A campaign that is designed to whip up the most extreme factions of his base into a near-frenzy and destined to reach deep into voters’ most secret prejudices and needle them. To generalize, his base is affluent—which is to say those most susceptible to the tactic of fear: they are, simply, comfortable people with the most to lose. To generalize, his base is middle-class—which is to say proud and willing to sacrifice for some higher ideals, something familiar and historical, something beyond itself. And to generalize again, his base is poor—which is to say ignored and forgotten, and often most susceptible to each and every pillow-talk promise, most willing to vote not their present circumstances but their glorious (and highly unlikely) futures…vote for those brighter days ahead when their American Dream finally gets it’s lotto-ticket punched. McCain’s 2008 campaign has been based on reckless gambles, talking-point horses beaten beyond even recognition, illustrative set pieces, and performance opportunities—yarns packed to the gills with platitudes and world-weary tales of the hard-working everyman…as well as the standard witch hunts, un-Americans, and even heretics. It’s been a campaign aimed at anti-intellectualism, one that smirks at his opponent's eloquence…as if the substance of what was being said is of no consequence. And in that regard, it has been a successful campaign: it has found those it most sought and engaged them. Additionally it has also found those less-civic in their support, found those less concerned with America’s future as with America’s inglorious past…as sometimes embarrassingly and heartbreakingly evidenced by hand-scrawled signs reading "Mavrik," "Half-Breed Muslin" & "Socialiest" strewn across the distended underbelly of the American heartland.

It is called a tragic flaw because it is unavoidable, impending…because the flawed simply cannot help themselves. We've all watched as McCain simply could not help himself…even despite his valiant efforts. The schizophrenic mania manifest in clenched teeth, in physical ticks, in such restrained and barely-held-in-check tongue-jabs and emotions have pushed the man to his physical limit, if not into the white-hot glare of truth for all that it is hidden and that his body-language appears to betray. To hear the man say something like "My friends, I know we're all hurting," while not knowing how many houses he officially owns (much less unofficially) certainly doesn't ingratiate him to the less red of the blue collar set…those the Republican platform must, every election cycle, convince to vote against their own better futures and self-interests in support of the lavish, boundless lifestyle of the upper class. And it is in these so painfully obvious conflicts of interest that the campaign loses traction, where it becomes a comic sketch of itself…yet another annoyance in a campaign of annoyances, trivialities, dull and insipid little errands, chores—all these speeches and smart-ass debates—something simply to be gotten through between now and his magnificently imagined reign. Yes, those pesky, infuriatingly slow-churning wheels of democracy.

Absent from the hero’s journey—if we’re to believe that is what we are being sold—are the less glorious, more humanizing moments: owning mistakes; meaningful admonitions; confessing of one’s sins and transgressions by which the hero can learn to forgive himself…just as we, the audience, forgive him. Noticeably absent. Nearly non-existent. But from the ether-eye, from sources, from un-silent patriots come disturbing, un-heroic dispatches from the supposed front lines of McCain’s psyche…things that do not jive with the official narrative. Rage. Infidelity. Ruthless, quenchless ambition. A hard-charging drunkard with a thirst for dice. A brat insulted by his advantages, but not enough to refuse to abuse them. Misogyny. The word “cunt.” These are separate, unofficial narratives…witnessed reports, yet stories without redaction, stories the merits of which I am neither qualified nor inclined to debate. These are stories McCain apparently refuses to dignify with response (we’ll ignore the argument that perhaps, just perhaps, the electorate might be entitled to it). But that they are is what bears mentioning—leave the exposés to those better suited—what further clouds the tangled threads of his narrative. I have no doubt that politics is a rough business, that every misstep is mercilessly amplified in an election year and especially in this election year. I have no doubt that running for President of the United States is immeasurably difficult. But so is maintaining a crumbling façade.


3

“And we vote for, and follow with interest, that political hero who dramatizes our lives and relieves, for a while, the feeling of hopelessness and anomie that is the stuff of modern civilization.”
-David Mamet - from ‘Letters of Transit’,
3 Uses Of The Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

Yes, but what is the story McCain prefers? It seems a failed hero’s tale wherein he, in 2008, has little choice. Ignore the base and he risks alienating the Christian right—and his campaign wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Or so he seems resigned to think. But, tactically, what of courting to this base? Is that even sane when facing an opponent decades your inferior in terms of experience, not to mention being the first-ever African American major party Presidential candidate? Wasn't simply being the Republican nominee probably going to, to put it simply, be enough? Did McCain honestly think that the Republican base would ever consider voting for what they would no doubt see as a weak, tax-and-spend, faggoty, tree-hugging, liberal terrorist—even if he wasn’t black? Or was it just desperately begging the lost affections of 2000, the unrealized ousting of Bush in 2004, instead of appealing to today’s much more broad and contemporary voting set?

In many ways I think McCain should have been himself, the McCain of 2000, instead of this straw man, dreamed up by the GOP machine. He has sacrificed his own heart for a shot at the White House, and has done so, I think, to great personal detriment. The disjointed tactics, the grumblings from his inconsistent, divided camp, seem largely those of a blood-thirsty mob being just barely (if not inadequately) restrained…not much of a legacy. Watching it unfold has suggested, to me, a kind of crisis of conscience for McCain. At least I want to believe it has. It also has suggested regret of his many errant decisions…including turning to the very gnashing teeth of a combine that devoured him 8 years ago. Yes, had McCain run simply as himself and were he to lose, at least it would rest solely on him, on his hero's shoulders…instead of easily justified or explained away by consequence and ill-fate. Yes, better the loss be attributed to his volatile and barely suppressed rage, to his failed policies, his poor decisions, his underestimation of voters, or his lack of vision and understanding. At least, then, his worth as a civil servant and a man would not be in question. That would, I think, be easier to take. After all, who is to blame when the very same meritocracy upon which all your deepest beliefs are centered somehow has you losing the big game?

But he has not been himself—which is to say the earlier versions of himself, the story of John McCain that I prefer to ascribe to, the one I choose and believe is more representative of the actual man. I watched at rallies, him standing idly by, while extreme supporters called for the literal head of his opponent. I fully expected him to do something about it, and believe the McCain of 2000 would have. But to see him this time—looking around, smiling uncomfortably, turning to an unseen someone looking for guidance, for help—made me wonder if he even had anything left, anything that could be saved. I see, in McCain, an angry, sad, and broken man. I also see a relieved man. To openly embrace the divisive and destructive tactics that the same GOP machine used to derail his more honorable and very legitimate near-Presidential campaign, the Straight Talk Express, …to see him devolve into someone else, one who would reverse himself so drastically on his pet projects, including immigration and the moral issue of torture (for which even the ugliest Rove-ean political opportunist would have still given him a pass) suggests a deep, pathological need to win. Beyond talk. Beyond promises. Beyond American futures. Beyond pledges and the slaughter of political mischaracterization visited on him by those he now begs to destroy his opponent. He seems cursed to view all his failures not in the eyes of himself (by which he could learn from them) but in those of his dead forefathers…haunted by men he (and others) have lionized into some kind of ideal, some cheapjack Greek gods, men McCain has always wanted to equal and—let's be honest—always wanted to finally best…at something…somehow. For my money, that is what has made him so desperate, so willing to be someone he was not. Perhaps the end, once again, justified the means…as it almost never has before. Or always has, depending on who you ask. And as his deep-seated need to win runs headlong into his impending failure, he is forgetting his own story and forgetting to beware the dramatic promises a narrative makes—as expectations are planned resentments.

I see in McCain the facts of himself, as his story has been retroactively constructed: the narrative yarn that is, to him, so utterly convincing as to doggedly adhere almost exclusively to it—even as it, as a political tactic, fails him. Yes, a man transformed by his life’s darkest hours from a reckless, impetuous youth to a measured man of God and country first. He has ignored the rest. Worse is that even in telling himself the story he needs most believe, telling himself the story of himself, he’s done so not with war stories as one might expect. And they are not tales where he's overcome some great challenge internal or obstacle external. Sadly, while those threads do occasionally work into the larger narrative, the stories McCain tells himself, the roles in which he prefers to cast himself, are the stories not of heroes but of martyrs: of those who—instead of doing something, anything—are simply people to which unfortunate and treacherous things like fate, time, and circumstance just seem to happen; stories not of a tortured yet still determined, murderous Hamlet but, instead, of a broken, bewildered old fool Lear; not so much the prodigal son returned 'with the scars to prove it' as that of a silver-spooned Jesus whose crucifixion wasn't even enough to finally win his dead grandfather's or father’s love.

And it must be asked: does the man even want to be President? Reaching now (and perhaps it’s psycho-babble), but what other choice does a man born to the purple, born to every advantage have—save self-sabotage and wanton tales of martyrdom—to explain away his failures? What else does a man born to every advantage have—save self-sabotage—by which he can finally reject his pathological and desperately failed attempts to measure up? McCain somehow needs to be both hero and victim, both winner and loser, both magnanimous martyr and stone-faced executioner. He needs an escape hatch, a hedged bet, some back-door-extraction from yet another of his life’s untenable psychological situations. He needs it to be okay to succeed, sure. But he needs it to be even more okay to fail. How else are we to explain away Sarah Palin—when the GOP is rife with far more loyal, knowledgeable, capable, & inspired choices? That even Lear needed his fool? Surely McCain cannot have such little regard for the intellect of the American electorate, can he? I see in him—as all great martyrs—a deep sadness, an unreachable place, one that joy cannot find. I think he knows it. And I think he knows that winning this election will not make it go away. And while I have no doubt the man is haunted by some pathological need to best his grandfather and his father in some way, to become something they were not such that the lifelong comparisons might finally cease, and the whispers of his own unhappy heart might be silenced—I think there is a large part of him that does not want to win, one that is content to appear as if he fought tooth and nail but was, ultimately, bested by a man better-suited, and more beloved of the people—or—one with more nefarious crooks and cronies in his corner, and it was, once again, his honor that defeated him. It is, after all, the role he’s most comfortable playing, the story he’s most accustomed to living. And the role he has, after 70+ years, maybe even made his peace with.

I am sorry for the man. Not enough to vote for him, of course…yet sorry all the same. Such tragedy, both personal and professional, has rarely (if ever) played out to the delight of so many worldwide—and never on such grand a national and international stage.

We've all unfortunately and unwittingly borne witness.

————————
Suggested Readings

-“Make-Believe Maverick” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone Magazine
-“The Making (and Remaking) of McCain” by Robert Draper, GQ Magazine
-After Henry and The White Album (or, anything, really) by Joan Didion
-3 Uses of the Knife: On the Nature & Purpose of Drama by David Mamet

That Last Small Shard

by Christopher Cunningham

The dusk approaches here in the deep south and the final glittering rays of a long day cut thru the gold and red autumn leaves left hanging on the skeletal limbs. The light scatters across the cool ground, over the collapsing garden, the overgrown grasses, the dust and dirt where the dogs rumble. We've passed thru the ugly swelter of summer and made it thru what seems like years of stale and stagnant heat and now find ourselves at the brink of something large and strange, something without real shape, without definition. We look over the edge and cannot fathom what lies beyond the edge of this weird precipice, what our future might hold. It might be a place of hope, but who can really say? Having come thru the last eight years with the shreds of our humanity and the remnants of our spirit hanging in rough tatters from our bones, we are not prepared to hazard a guess. The apparatus of the police state remains in place, the consolidated power of the executive branch remains, the rights we lost during the Bush administration have not yet been restored, the racist rhetoric from the willfully ignorant grows more and more virulent (especially the closer we get to possibly having a *gasp* Black Man in the Oval Office), the dollar continues to collapse, weak Democratic leaders are still running the show (Reid and Pelosi), droves of war criminals, thieves, zealots, con artists, perverts and psychopaths are all going to remain at large, and etc.

But here under this fading southern sun we still manage to dig deep down into the stinking muck of the last eight years under neocon/corpofascist rule and unearth one more fragment of hope for the human animal. As the grey days of winter approach, we still manage to believe that enough of us, after repeatedly smashing our fingers with a hammer and wondering why our fingers hurt so fucking much and then doing it again and again and again, will eventually stop smashing our own fingers; that at some point we must realize it is WE who are doing the smashing and WE have the power to stop it. Sure, there will always be the freak who gets off on the pain; we can never persuade such malformations of humanity that some things are TRUE and not open to debate. We can never change the minds of idiots who grin with glee as they work with endless determination to tear down the very construct of their own sad and pathetic lives, simpletons who are terrified that some OTHER is going to somehow come and steal their trailer, their Walmart card, their fifteen year old pickup truck or the seven bucks in their tattered leather wallet. And we shouldn't waste our energy trying. Ken Kesey said, "Put your good where it will do the most." That's the only way to look at things you cannot change. You can't save all the stray dogs in the world no matter how much you might wish to do so. Let em have their hammer and stay the fuck out of their way (until they wander over into your yard swinging that stupid thing; then they'll have to be dealt with in The Proper Fashion).

All we can really do is stare into that dark empty space before us and imagine a blank canvas where we can project that last spark, that last small shard of diamond dust glinting, that last drive and determination to manufacture hope out of the smoking remains of the American Dream. All we can do is be glad that we still possess the capacity for laughter, the capacity for song.

Here we allow ourselves a moment to chuckle approaching the eve of something potentially historic, on the cusp of something we cannot predict, at the birth and unfolding of a whole new era of "unknown unknowns." We allow ourselves five minutes of hope before we get back to making sure whatever good parts of humanity that are left still live on by making art, by growing as much of our own food as we can, by doing as little harm as we can, by helping each other and paying close attention to our world, to our government, to our surroundings, and by actively participating in the unfolding actuality of our lives, uncolored by delusion, unfounded opinion, mistaken patriotism, blissful ignorance or useless superstition. Here we continue to endure. We stand in those fading rays and smile in the small bit of warmth that covers us, and enjoy the feeling of possibility.

And we get ready for what is to come.
 

Letter to A Young Tortured Genius

by Christopher Cunningham

so you want to be the greatest writer ever huh?

first of all: love, the maintaining of an intense, meaningful relationship where two people have each other's back, and can trust each other no matter what, are willing to go to Room 101 for the other and have rats strapped to their heads, this is the essential connection that all writing seeks to make; like the saxophone seeks to mimic the human voice singing, the breath from the heart and soul translated into musical notes that transcend the limits of puny speech and mere language, so does writing attempt a Great Connection, a Great Communication, the forging of a link between writer and reader that is so like love that it is, at its finest, capable of drawing out the deepest emotions, causing weeping and laughter, sorrow, pain, soaring freedoms, the Pure Understanding. this is also the goal of love. it is the goal of ALL GREAT ART in the end: connection to the ethereral, the intangible, the impossible.

listen: you must shed this "DESIRE" that will, in the end, cripple you. this DESIRE to "be the greatest *blank*" is an illusion. you will never be the GREATEST WRITER, because there will ALWAYS be someone coming up behind you who will do something that will make YOU, the "greatest writer" (by whomever's standards...yours? hardly a capable judge. an editor? fallible as all hell. jesus? good fucking luck...) shudder in your skin and sweat blood and finally grab for the ol' Hemingway shotgun. this is the path of your desire to be the greatest. believe me. I've lived it. finally, you won't be able to outdo your OWN PAST WRITING, no matter how great, and it will kill you.

here brother: learn to be the GREATEST HUMAN first. learn to suffer the misery of COMPASSION, that is, the SUFFERING WITH another that draws GREAT WRITING out of you. throw yourself into love, the FULLNESS OF IT, and LET THE WRITING COME AS IT WILL. this desire will make you FORCE the words, and trust me, it will show. no matter how good you get at the TRICK of writing (that's all it is, really, a magic trick: a conjuring, an illusion like a house of mirrors that reflects the world back upon the reader thru his own eyes, allowing the writer to disappear, leaving only the mysterious puff of fog down a dark midnight alley glinting in the dim streetlights of Prague or St. Louis or Mexico City) you will always be forced to BE A HUMAN LIVING A LIFE.

man, you have to understand most of all that you will WRITE no matter what. you will carve hours out of the night that you never knew existed, all the while living your life with your women, your jobs, your hurts and your triumphs. if this girl means as much to you as you say, there is no need to sacrifice EITHER ONE. one is tangible and real, and one is a beautiful dream that you will never achieve except in the ABSTRACT. I've writ some shit that has made folks stare at me in amazement at how CLOSE TO THE BONE I'VE GOTTEN, and in the end, it's my relationship with my woman for twenty fucking years that matters. the TRUST AND PURE HONESTY OF LOVE. I used to think I had to sacrifice for my art. and I do. and so do you. but the sacrifice comes with the LIVING OF A LIFE IN THE TRAGEDY OF OUR MORTALITY, and doing it WELL. to leave a shining mark on the cave wall for others to find. to make a CONNECTION with another human being that is something done out of selflessness and compassion and the will to give, to sacrifice in a way that isn't negative but rather a positive expression of the best humanity can offer.

getting the artform down is the most important thing in the world to me. but the art lies in the connection generated by the CREATION. and you don't always need the creation to make that connection. the two are not mutually exclusive my man. take it from me. I've spent my LIFE, every waking moment in pursuit of exactly the dream you have, and it has brought me to this place where I can clearly see that the dream is not something attainable, but rather a DRIVING MOTIVATION to make a LIFE THAT IS ART. like Henry Miller said, something about how eventually he will get his life just right and then will never need to write another word, having acheived the PURPOSE OF THE WRITING.

Buk wanted to be the greatest, to kick Hem's ass, and even if he managed, in some ways, to do just that, he still sought LOVE FIRST OF ALL. it was PRIMARY in terms of motivation. the isolated loner puts pen to paper and sends it out into the world hoping for CONNECTION, for someone to say I HEAR YOU SCREAMING. this is literature, my man. get the words down, get them down down down, until the pages cry out, but never forget that by giving up your HUMANITY, you lessen the power of the art.

now having said all this, your partner MUST UNDERSTAND that SOMETIMES we cannot be bothered, that when they hear the MACHINE RUNNING they must find SOMETHING ELSE TO DO. there has to be COMMON GROUND, and if you feel like you are being hampered, you might try a deep examination of motivation, of purpose, of desire, of respect, etc. my lady would NEVER interrupt me or dissuade me from my art but likewise I have to FIND THE BALANCE and respect that there are TIMES WHEN I MUST SIMPLY BE A MAN living a hard human life, mowing the grass, growing some veggies in the garden, cleaning up dogshit, saying I love you, etc. it is ALL PART OF IT: THE MAKING OF ART. it all translates. leave nothing out. make nothing up.

TELL THE TRUTH FIRST. if you do that it will all fall into place. and brother: RELAX. burning up in a furious pyre does NOBODY ANY GOOD, especially you. tell the truth and get it down. be a GREAT WRITER. AND BE A GREAT HUMAN. be kind, be honest, gamble with class and dignity, crush the typewriter with lines like sledgehammers and doom, drink black coffee, sleep late and laugh when you can. this is all you can hope for brother. all else is gravy.
 

The Second Coming

by Hosho McCreesh

originally appeared in installments over at Upright

Part One: The Second Coming*

*(see Yeats)

Shame on us. Shame on all of us. From the humble beginnings of man, be them miraculous & divine or primordial & oozing, this is what we've done with it. We gave up painting cave walls and instead picked up a splintered femur & re-invented murder. We learned to hunt & trap animals, learned where the best tasting berries grew, learned how to stay out of the elements, how to keep warm...& since then we've become positively BORED with ourselves. Do we even do anything we want to anymore? Do we ever do anything we're proud of? Shame on almost the entire rotting stinking lot of us.

I am sick of people who believe things.

Listen, I believe things...some of them deep-rooted, powerful ideals...for me. But let's be clear about this: Just because I believe it doesn't make it so, doesn't make me right, doesn't make people who disagree with me wrong, or people who agree with me my friends. What I do is wander through the world that I perceive through my own eyes, reacting to what I encounter, & within me exists my own belief structure which may be well-calibrated or may be completely out of whack, but whatever the case, it's mine, & it's how I get through what's difficult, how I enjoy what's wonderful, how I find the "story in the suicide," & how I decide what to do next. Beliefs? Convictions? Ideals? What in the hell are they? They are little more than tools used to work through this agony & ecstasy, our way to make sense of the misguided majesty of living. Ours. Not others. & certainly not everyone's.

Carefully now, so there's no confusion: this is not to say that we should abandon all that we think we know & compromise our hearts--no no no. This is instead an indictment of any & all belief structures that harbor, in their fetid bowels, any hypocrisy, any judgment, any exemptions from their own unbreakable rules. I myself must refuse to allow my own stupid head to convince me that I know everything...or that I even know anything. Human ignorance has only begat more human ignorance, & it has done so for centuries, will do so for centuries. Humans invented their gods. Humans invented their governments. Humans invented the imaginary lines drawn on maps that humans sketched, supposedly separating us one from the other. None of these things are as simple as a sunflower & yet these ideas, these concepts, have drowned this planet in the black-caked blood of centuries, of millennia. This hurtling goddamned rock is blood-logged. How can we forgive what has been done in the name of god & country & government? What continues to be done? The horrors perpetrated? All of it based on imaginary notions made real by a deluded zealotry that has poisoned the human race. Our hearts know this. The sad truth is we humans have invented our own misery. Our hearts also know this.

I write poems. I paint. That entitles me to nothing. I live in America, but no gods favor me over their other countless creations, other planets, & most definitely not over fellow humans...no matter where they reside, how they look, or how they think. I am simply one of the many animate beings, a slave to my own capricious biochemicals & perceptions, misperceptions...we all are. We pretend at the divine while wallowing in the carnival of our own man-made damnation.

We'll have to dig deep holes to save all these meaningless trinkets we've hoarded, hide them from the hellfire doom we've wrought. There will be no revolution until we're forced to pack our intestines with gravel to simply remember what it's like to feel full; until we abandon all our vengeful & exclusionary gods & our bumbling countries & castrated governments & replace them with something that works...for us, something our hearts know as righteous, just, true. Beliefs? They are but a falcon, loosed like a plague on the unchaperoned heavens, they split the sky like from a womb. The seed embeds; grows fat; forms man--imperfect & inventive, this misfit. We began by learning one thing, then another & soon we were bored by all we knew & conjured up wacky things to believe in: gods, maps, borders, ways of thinking, ways of of ruling, ideals, judgments. The misfit then Balkanized Eden & reinvented murder. The march of time lands us here, now, with a globe overrun by knee-jerk reactionaries & still we do precious little to spare our atherosclerotic hearts, all gone aplump on the back-fat cuttings of each other. What sense is there to make of a world convinced that whatever they think is righteous, justified, true? Liquid & convenient, these random & foolishly taprooted ideals, invented to justify our murderous & self-serving hearts. Ours is a green god writhing, a golden calf without its neck slit, a false idol. We have only our foolish selves to blame now that sin has usurped virtue. Doom!--my unborn cousins, sisters, brothers, it begs purchase in the radioactive, blistered, weathered crags of the America womb! & thundercrack the skulls of too-soon-dead patriots, splintered, ground down to bonemeal 'neath the thunder of 2 billion feet marching bloody, red as Mao*, forming ranks & advancing, bent on the dusty end. Pitiless & blank, we the Sphinx churn our stoney thighs & trample what's left of Eden...& the worst need no reasons, no evidence, no proof, while the best know less tomorrow than they did today...

At least that's what I think...

Part Two: And Good Luck Outrunning Our Primal Selves!

I just don't see the value in being skull-locked into any brand of dogged, unyielding notion. At this point it would take an entire volley of warheads just to recalibrate the species and god only knows what to dig out the infected roots. Why believe in anything when believing means doing things unbelievable? Why believe in a god when believing means doing things ungodly? Why believe in justice when believing means doing things unjust? Why believe in humanity when believing means doing things that are abjectly inhuman? Better to place your unblinking faith in witchcraft, in voodoo, in genocide, in a final nuclear solution - this graveyard planet littered with only the shadows of its extinct blast-burned on building and boulder. Better the blade "quick and true" than to hear the tireless explanations; better the buckshot than entertain yet another ill-conceived filibuster of convenient intellection; better the rack than suffer case-by-case justifications for actions perpendicular to some quotidian philosopher's so-called personal compass; and better the crucifixion than the rhetorical longshot scenarios which condone hypocrisy and rationalize some phantom delineation between a proverbial inner "magnetic North" and an inner "true North" which the common rube uses to explain away any and all personal liability, excuses these humps use for their temporary dalliances from their otherwise "bedrock core beliefs" as if such extenuations plumb or hold up in the goddamned wash...

Horse.
Fucking.
Shit.

Convictions, rigidly held insist upon rules rigidly held: any room for interpretation is a chasm tailored for doubt - even a hairline fracture wherein seeps condensation, wherein it freezes then expands, melts, re-freezes, eventually breeches the hull. Hence, any belief - any TRUE BELIEF - is blind and cannot allow questions. Nor can it withstand them. They wilt flaccid to rudimentary examination. Any single allowance, any one semantic exception, any sniff that the world is not one of contrasting absolutes and the hypothesis is summarily rebuffed, the lords of ultimatum properly and riotously sacked. To say it another way: a black and white world must always disavow all greys, because the mere existence of any grey illegitimates all blacks and all whites.

So what does the color grey have to do with our primal selves? Only this: Let's quit pretending we're much more, as a species, than Pavlov's dogs, more than a grey, or that we're some sort of black or white. "What? Pavlov's dogs?" you say. I know, I know, pardon you while you scoff. "Man is sublimely evolved, the top of the food chain, supremely intelligent, a sentient being of the highest order," says you, "we're immune to such bestial wailings..." The works of Michelangelo and an honest mechanic or line cook not withstanding, I've seen grown men racing ride-on lawn mowers and other grown men recording this so even more grown men could telecast it for me, a grown man who sat watching the broadcast. This is precisely where we have put ourselves. Pardon me while I scoff back. We are all salivating at the knell of any and all manner of shiny goddamned bell. We're rats gone mad at the feeder bar. Higher functioning rats, perhaps, but rats all the same. Disagree? Then imagine the time-clocks we all punch as feeder bars, and imagine the generations of men that have powdered their knuckles punching them, all for a few meager moneypellets at the end of every other week or so.

Forget the circus of magnanimity, our main concern is of, for and about ourselves. Even our most altruistic philanthropy can be made to serve a primal need to either be hailed, appreciated, or envied. Rarely is it done with a pure heart. Our loins crave moist flesh, our innards meat, our bodies shelter, and our strangled spirits crave meaning. From these cravings - invention, innovation - all man-made and ridiculously imperfect. From all these cravings - conditioned, Pavlovian responses - we've indoctrinated ourselves to never be happy, to always want for more - what madness! We have engineered and manufactured every single ugly desire and ignorant lust, pounded it into each other's bent spines, we loll about in the stink of it like some fetid, putrid green pool. Our primal selves have forgotten how to be content, how to live simply and well, how to eat, drink and just be merry. We've forgotten how to be beautiful. And good luck outrunning our primal selves!

Abandoning just about everything we thought we knew & thought we wanted might be the only way back: lest the entire sky be wasted on us.

Part Three: Pavlov & The Last Laughing Neanderthal

So what of this business of dogs & gods? Just this: even Pavlov’s dogs knew better than we do not to shit where you eat. Salivating wants aside, the gist of what I’m driving at here is this: as with Pavlov & his mutts, any behavior rewarded is one that persists. Conversely, a behavior fades from existence if unrecognized, unheralded. If, for instance, we were to stop taking pictures of Paris Hilton, just you try & guess what would happen...

So we are to blame. For all we’ve encouraged & for all we’ve let die by the wayside, we are to blame. We are to blame & shame on us. You give me science, you give me gods, you give me technology to blast men into space, chart the fissures of Mars in search of water, or makes a Snicker’s candy bar more damnably delicious–you give me all of these things as proof positive of the undying nature & spirit of man. I give you our laughably repeated histories. I give you centuries of basically pointless & unimaginative wars, starving babies while abundant grains rot in silos & farmers are paid not to farm. I give you impermanent lines we’ve imagined across mountains & floating in rivers & oceans–lines our own generations worth of humans have died defending from ourselves. Not from space-aliens, or the brutal assault of mother nature, or anything wholly outside of us, mind you–but ourselves, only ourselves. We dream up things to believe in, believe so fervently in them that we fashion, of our innocent-of-all-but-disagreeing human counterparts, enemies. & thus we are the architects of human misery. Because at the end of the day almost every human I’ve ever met wants basically the same thing: a sustainable source of food, shelter & clothing from their respective & brutal climes, & a way to worry less. Some want solidarity, some want community, some to be left alone. Most benefit from a sense of purpose. Most flourish beneath the weight of love & family. Most deteriorate under tightly girded lack of freedoms. Most want to be heard in some way, want to matter. Most want to be alive, want to bear witness to the simple majesty of it. Increasingly, many don’t want this current manifestation of the world. Too few have too much; too many not enough. Of all these simple, basic, primal needs, too few are being met, for most. How can we believe in any of that? How can that be right or just? How have we ruined Eden so completely? Is it simply a question of geography? Have we become to wrapped up in the lines & borders we’ve invented to remember that before us there were no lines, before us it was just one hunk of hurtling rock? Have we forgotten that it will be that again when we’re gone? Or do these troubling questions about our own mortality & impermanence just fuel the madness?

If so, for many religion is the source of calm, the thing that quiets the swelling inner fears–fair enough. Use it then, keep it–if there is purpose in it for you. But let’s try to remember that there are different brand names, that it’s not the only thing people fill their days with (some might find as much fulfillment in shopping) & that religions too are man-made (or at least man-manipulated) & therefore imperfect. I’ll even allow that most religions, at the core, encourage the same kinds of tenets: simply put, to do things that make you better tomorrow than you are today. I can even admire the undertaking, the self-examination &courage to try & change. As a journey, it’s one that, in the end, can bring peace & meaning to an unquiet heart. Let’s not forget this very important truth: while not mutually exclusive, religion can be something staggeringly different from spirituality. By way of example I offer this: when you find yourself slathering at the maw for your particular brand of religion, unable to appreciate the fact that others who follow a different text are on just as sacred of a journey as you are, when you find yourself with your high-powered cross-hairs beaded on a fellow human, or you’re diving a plane full of innocent travelers into a skyscraper full of innocent workers, when you’re carpet bombing a village or you’ve got a satchel bomb strapped to yourself in a bus full of people going to get bread & beans at a market–religion might condone that, but spirituality certainly cannot. & in such moments it’s absolutely necessary to question how you’ve strayed to the furthest extremes of what your particular text teaches–often ignoring scripture contrary to such extremities en route–& try to identify what specific little religious hang-up derailed your spiritual journey & took you so far from what you supposedly believed in.

Now, perhaps we are too many. Perhaps humans were meant to roam in much smaller packs, driven together by the wild throes of necessity & uncertainty. Perhaps our distended & decaying souls are truly beyond redemption. Perhaps we’re damned to always succumb to our wanton & childish lusts. Perhaps we were supposed to die off as cavemen, & some last laughing Neanderthal bore witness to a spectacular innovation that saw his tiny pack through to the other side of that planned & certain extinction. Perhaps we can blame him–be him Thag or Adam–& his heavy-browed cronies for damning us to a rotting pile-up of useless millennia. But I can’t quiet escape the fact that he knew better than we do, how to fill his days with meaning. As cautious as he had to step, the way even a turned ankle could be a death sentence, I see no way his days weren’t spent on the electric edge of his own mortality & that, in itself, is far more invigorating than the lifetimes we pass in cubicles, on subways, or crawling along in gridlock. I can’t help but see Thag or Adam cackling at all our useless toil, wondering just what in the fuck we are doing with this human race he handed us, this populace working so diligently to ensure it’s own unhappiness in the short term & demise in the long.

I believe it all makes a pretty convincing case against believing or relying on any of the shitty little gimcracks we’ve dreamed up & manufactured—be them objects, borders, ideas, or gods. I believe there was always supposed to be more to living than anything we currently know; believe we were meant–with our silly little lives–to justify & redeem the energies expended to create us…repay, with our honest & purest efforts, that caustic spark that bore us; believe we should all find our own way to make our time matter, to find some meaning in this...

But who cares what I think? I barely even care what I think. Like I said, I am sick of people who believe things...

Some General Thoughts on Art, Poetry and The Life

by Christopher Cunningham

The cockpit manual that rode down at furious speeds along with the kamikaze pilots on suicide missions, smashing into ships and soldiers, recommends, "Do not waste your life lightly."

It has rained most of the last week here in the South. The cold weather is rolling in. I have been walking around with a good size hole in my right shoe. It is my only pair, my work shoes, my everyday shoes, all occasion. They've given me a coupla years quality service but now they are fading.

Why does any of this matter? Well, the hole in my shoe where greasy, food-scummy kitchen water flows in as I work in a hot restaurant, soaking my sock, chilling my foot, is more important than iambic pentameter.

Poetry boils down to an intense search for a searing moment of quiet truth, clearly illuminated. It isn't a craft that can be learned. It is a scream from the empty pockets, from the growling guts, from the time clock, from the tired bones on Monday morning. It isn't something that can be workshopped, it cannot be taught. Hell, it may not really exist. It might just be a trick of the light. All I do know is that we humans spend damn little time thinking about the miracle of our daily ability to draw breath, we spend no energy considering how impossible the simple fact of EVERYTHING is. We push papers, we push products, we push consumption and waste, we push dope, we push god, we push, but there is nowhere to go, nothing to push. We curse traffic, we long for speed, but we are already there.

And the poem, the artform, is the only way we, with our simple little brains, can ever hope to GO BEYOND the tangible and touch a measure of truth, a glimpse of understanding, and maybe a bit of meaning in our motions.

Those who ignore the creation of beauty are dead. Those who are dead have no hope. The dead question nothing, the dead cannot love, the dead do not laugh. Yet they wander thru the world, eyes open, never thinking about why. That fucking word: WHY? The answer lies in the look that passes across a person's face when they stare at a van Gogh or a Monet, when they read a poem that speaks to them TRUTHFULLY, with no bullshit, when they hear Miles play a note that isn't there, and the silence that cloaks it in mystery. The answer lies in the mystery. The answer is why we gasp at a falling star, why we smile when we are alone. Even when we are alone in the dark and the cold weather comes moaning.

Nietzsche gives us a take on the answer: "To give a life meaning: that has been the grand endeavor of all who have preached 'truth;' for unless life is GIVEN a meaning, it has none."

So the answer is the smell of black coffee on Sunday reading the paper by a sunny window. Or a poem.

And when you strip away nations, races, ideology, isms, faiths, laws, etc., you are left with a human being. You are left with a collection of cells, atoms, elements that were born in the throes of space, from the bellies of stars and dying worlds, lifetimes ago. This sheer miracle should be enough to stop even the basest of thinker in his tracks with a wide mouth "O" of wonder. This should be enough to end war, end hunger, end mindless entertainment on the television and replace it with the magic of creation.

What else is there except joy? The bone hand reaching from the dim forest at the end of each of our lives? Might as well laugh, you can't save yourself.

But you can save that part of us all that might be worth saving by getting it down. By painting the cave walls, by writing a pointless poem for no one to read. Or, maybe, one.

"When you find you can go neither backward nor forward, when you discover that you are no longer able to stand, sit or lie down, when your children have died of malnutrition and your aged parents have been sent to the poorhouse or the gas chamber, when you realize that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird." Henry Miller said that.

And the poem, for me, is exactly that miracle. The metaphor that allows us to experience the unsayable again and again. The silence between notes. The truth.

Or, I might just be a cook with a hole in his shoe and a typewriter, while outside the winter watches from over an approaching horizon, and dogs bark, and planes fly over, shaking the house, with my stomach rumbling. And what does that mean?

And why?

"Do not waste your life lightly."

The Valley Below

by Christopher Cunningham

(this essay orginally appeared in a slightly different form at Upright)

An overcast day here in the ugly south; a cool wind blows, barely stirring the stagnant grey film that is suspended, like a body from a hangman's noose, in the thick moist air. There is the promise of storms and the last whirring buzz of insects before the winter is upon them, and an uneasy feeling of weight upon the shoulders, a feeling of pressure from an unseen source. These days everything feels like a sign of trouble, even the trembling of curled brown leaves on trembling tree limbs. Each conversation leads to contested definitions from flawed sources, each idea is twisted by ideology and agenda, each thought barely and rarely tested for truth. As the autumn wind blows and the dark clouds gather every narrowing of the eyes is a call to war.

These days we argue over the color of the sky even when there is no real argument, no room for debate. Some of us have lost the ability to discern opinion from truth, fact from slanted fiction. We are presented with a choice between a healthy meal and a shit sandwich and some remain “undecided.” But there is still some truth in the world, even as we are awash in both difficult shades of grey and staggering waves of gleefully willful ignorance; honest answers do still exist, actual tangible realities that cannot be debated, cannot be altered to fit a predetermined purpose. There remains the seeking nature of the human animal, desperate as long as his existence to find meaning, to discover joy, to investigate and explore the mysteries of life and understand our purpose as conscious, sentient beings on a glowing blue rock in the middle of a desolate black void. There is the desire for the bond between parent and child, the connection between man and woman, the coming together of good friends that can be called love, this selfless joining of humanity for something greater than themselves, something intangible.

There is, and has been, much that drives us as humans. There is much that divides and separates us as well. Most of us want to "make a mark" of some kind, and if we don't, we are satisfied with merely passing thru, hopefully trying to do no real harm as we go (though there are always exceptions to anything). We all define that "mark" differently; some of us seek a measure of enlightenment from our time here, a better understanding of ourselves and our place in a cold and uncaring universe, a greater depth of empathy and compassion with our fellow human beings and some hope for the future of all things. Some of us hope to create great works of art that elucidate the complexities of the human condition, art that explores our suffering natures and our inextinguishable endurance in the face of our inevitable mortality, art that sets out into the desert with no water, confident in an inexplicable outpouring of creativity from the ether. Some of us hope to raise families full of good people who contribute to society: tradesmen, craftsmen, teachers, leaders, police officers, firefighters, hard working men and women who make up the teeming legions that keep civilization functioning, who perform the necessary tasks to keep everyone safe, secure, educated and as happy as is possible.

But today, we find ourselves at a curious place, a place where many of us have a stranger goal in mind: to get rich. Middle class folks who think that dollars are the final arbiter of success, who consistently vote against their own interests, strive for some unattainable future wonderland of wealth and contentment. It is an outgrowth of a society that values the glittering surface more than the murky depths, a world where material gains are the measure of one’s worth; where money equals freedom, and not having any equals servitude in a variety of ways (the time clock, the credit card companies, impossible health insurance premiums, cheap unhealthy but affordable fast food, etc.). Some folks want to be rich, thinking an obscenity of wealth will bring with it peace, security and happiness. But it won’t. It never has. It never will.

I agree with the premise that in the world as we find it, we do have to have money and we do have to pay our bills. But none of the situations above (joy, family, love, the search for real meaning and especially the desperate need for a connection between one human and another) require an obscenity of wealth, and most of them require nothing from money short of the basic necessities like food and shelter, money that will be spent in the service of either empty, pre-disintegrated, planned-obsolescence consumerism or the generation of still more income for the bank account and for the inheritance of children who will one day not know what it means to make a living. And what do we all want out of life anyway? Happiness? Safety? Comfort? What? None of these can be purchased, even safety. Real safety is as much an illusion as sawing a woman in half. There is no avoiding death, no matter how hard we try, no matter the money we acquire, no matter the fortified walls we construct. There is nothing for it. All you are ever doing is postponing the inevitable (and why? to make more money?). So safety's out. And comfort? Sure you can buy a hundred soft couches but you can only sit on one at a time. Anything else is for the benefit of other people, anything large scale is so others can envy your acquisitions, your things, your stuff, which feeds the shallow ego that seeks only MORE. That thinking may satisfy in the short term, you can gloat about your "success," feel good about "making it,” but what happens when your wife dies? What happens when your kid gets leukemia? What happens when your livelihood is ripped from you by forces you can't control with any amount of money? Where do you go for that comfort, that safety, that happiness? Do you turn to your dollars, your investments or your property? Will that bring any solace when your heart is broken? Will a life spent in service to the concept of money, bowing at the high altar of "free market capitalism" (a fucking lie as our recent socialist takeover of private banks and so forth) with its Mafioso mentality of “hey, it’s just business” used to excuse even the most disturbing of personal transgressions against each other, be fulfilling if you've never experienced love? If you've ever sat in silence and marveled at the mystery and impossibility of each sunrise, vastly different from the one which preceded it and totally unlike the new dawn to follow, how do you compare the gain of another dollar in the totality of your life to such an experience of actually living?

For those unafraid of death via the religion gamble, you must be aware that money has NOTHING to do with why you are unafraid; you have a spiritual confidence in something greater than you, something that is outside the influence of men, and of human trivialities. Like money. You are confident that your salvation isn’t in the hands of the private sector, and isn’t for sale or barter. You have faith in an idea that exists outside of the inventions of men with worldly desires and fallibilities. Hell, and money, throughout the history of organized religion, has been a corrupting, not unifying, force that makes it possible to control the message of a religion. It doesn’t matter what I think about the afterlife, and it doesn’t make a difference to my philosophy or yours whether or not we have a dime between us.

Of course, numerous examples exist in the secular world of the leader/follower/innocent fellow “just-trying-to-get-ahead” being felled by greed and corruption: see ENRON and the screwing of many hardworking Americans for an example. We often forget that the financial landscape of modern capitalism is an invention of investors and bankers who wanted to make a bundle of money by charging interest on loaning same, as well as chopping up our enormous personal debts into saleable packages to leverage into billions and billions. Their goal was to make more money. Further, we find our political lives shaped by the influence of vast sums of money. Look at ol' Tom Delay and the “K Street Project;” a venture full of such luminaries as criminal thug Jack Abramoff, where the world of lobbyists was bent to the will of the Republican party (the dominant party with all the control), neatly subverting the electoral will of the American People, by padding all positions with party loyalists and cronies, a revolving door of private sector cash infusions, illegal backroom deals and CEOs cum Senators cum Lobbyists crafting laws designed to maintain the status quo/financial power structure. Look at John McCain's entire fucking campaign staff. And what, pray tell, in our Brave New World is the measure of power? Yes indeed: money. If you have enough, you can even disrupt the proper course of our so-called democracy, rendering those who lack wealth powerless, without influence over the workings of their very lives, screaming in a deafening silence. Capitalism, and the “free market economy,” a clearly irresponsible misnomer, are designed to have winners and losers; it’s the nature of the beast.

So what have I expended this much space to say? Just this: there are measures of a life well lived, a life spent fully alive in service to the very mystery of our humanity, a life aware of the fragility of our perch here spinning around a ball of fire in the darkness. There are ways to recline on our death beds and be assured of that good life lived, and none of them include being "rich;" no one will think, "boy I wish I could have got one dollar more" or "I'm glad I spent every moment at my job" and you can bet if that is how they think, they lost a lot more than they gained. The old saw "you can't take it with you" is a cliche for a reason. But what you can take with you up to the very edge of the great unknown are the experiences: the memories, the loves that burned into your soul, the pain of loss, that hand you hold as you pass away from the material into the deep mystery of what comes after. These intangibles will be more real than any house, any yacht, any limo, more real than anything made and sold by men.

I know that money can do good works in the world, just as it can be bent to the will of the savage. It's a tool that reflects its holder. That's not the point. The point is, being rich isn't any kind of measure of a life well lived. Money isn’t the measure of one’s success. Money has nothing to do with how kind a person is, how well one’s lived. It's simply no "goal" to have. Your goals may include family, happiness, safety, peace, long life, and so forth but again, money cannot be what defines your time here. We do what we must to pay our bills and keep ourselves alive, but is the pursuit of large sums of such a meaningless concept as money a worthwhile goal? I mean, under the right circumstances, wouldn't the barter of goods and services among dedicated craftspeople with specialties other societal members lack be just as effective for maintaining a community? Surely not on the worldwide scale of humanity today, but hypothetically, wouldn't you be able to eat and clothe yourself? Couldn’t you take care of your family, build a shelter, etc.? Wouldn’t it benefit everyone to be good at their jobs because those jobs kept everyone alive and healthy? I mean, it all comes down to the necessities in the end.

Money is easy; ask any poker player. They'll tell you that money is just a stack of colored clay chips worth nothing. It is the life away from the table that is hard, and also the most rewarding.