Don’t Spare Me, Tell Me What You Really Think

DON’T:

Believe the hype.

Words sink as I reach for them. Knowledge is a fickle friend. Hiding when you need him. Wit abandons you, steals your clothes from the swimming hole. You always find yourself naked when it's cold.

Assaults coming from both sides now. Had you grown too comfortable in oblivion? Sucking on straws of helium, floating light with ignorant nonchalance. Thought it was a nice view. Every blurry little ant, the hazy mountainous horizon. Everything smooth, polished clean with the wax of your cataracts.

But that's not how we're meant to live. Up there with the birds. The thoughtless, soaring birds. We were meant for battle for conflict and conquest. And how easy it is to pop a balloon. To cut the achilles while one's head is in the clouds.

“Naivety, my sweet mistress, do not leave me now.”

Innocence: the persistent state of the absent minded.

He stuck his finger with his quill and wrote in haste on parchment paper, I'd rather face the world's brutalities than taste her tender lips. I'd rather live a hundred years alone, than feel her sweet caress. Then he lit a match and held the finger of a flame beneath the scribbled note. Watched the finger tickle the page and the paper shiver with laughter. Watched them play, till all was dust, a comedic mess of carbon. Lest he find one day those hasty words and recall his mistress’ infidelity. He longed for her return.

Everything is in question, everything is uncertain. We have no recourse but to plant our feet solidly in the air and wait for gravity to take its toll, dragging us uncomplyingly towards the one absolute certainty: death (the faith that unites us all).

Do you expect me to know? Do you expect me to believe? How can I know, how can I believe? Why should I know, why should I believe? You read some books, you heard some moving words, a charasmatic man held your hand and told you all the truth. And I, I read some books and I did not believe, I heard some moving words and I did not cry, a charasmatic man held my hand and told my all the truth, and I thought it was a lie.

I do not want your women.
I do not want your fun.
I do not want your beer or sex.
I do not want your drugs.
I do not want your Teddy God.
I do not want your fear.
I do not want your smirky grin.
I do not want your tears.
I do not want your anything.

(Yet as he posted his 99 theses on the gates of the church*, he recognized a distinct, but muffled voice, from deep in the basement of his soul. A phonograph spinning a broken record releasing a needle scratching voice. The singer sung only the truer truths in his dirty screen door voice. The hammer pounding drowned out the words, but the melody still remained. A haunting tune that brought to mind words never spoken, discoveries waiting to happen, wonders yet to be beheld, and shame for uncommitted acts.)

///Please forgive the grandiosity of this passage, the author clearly considers himself, quite erroneously, to be a demigod.

*of whatever