For Love and Writing

Love.

There is still a part of me that believes that love is a mental dysfunction. The term ‘mental dysfunction’ is used to describe conditions that cause people to have disturbed thinking, behavior and moods. Let me ask you, what sane person would go through the trials we go through for love? Only love can cause the mental break that would allow one to forget themselves in favor of living for another. And after love is lost … Do we find ourselves as we were? No. We find ourselves irreparably altered broken and distorted in the image we have for ourselves. But we love anyway. Rarely by choice do we find ourselves drawn and compelled to love. Love, some say, is like God; omnipotent, all encompassing and larger than our understanding.

Writing.

There is still a part of me that thinks the drive to write is a mental dysfunction. Let me ask you, what sane person would go through the trials we go through to produce a good piece of work? Let’s not even debate a GREAT piece of work. Writing causes a different type of mental break than love does. Hell a mental break is almost required of you in order to write and write well. We take ourselves outside of reality and into a world that exists only in our minds. Then we torture ourselves translating what we see in that world onto the page. Once is never enough. Once we’re done with one piece, like addicts, we begin another, sometimes more than one at a time. It’s a lonely suffering but we write anyway one keystroke at a time over and over. It’s the definition of insanity, but we write anyway. Rarely by choice we find ourselves drawn and compelled to write.

Love and Writing

Love and writing are like alcoholism, or drug addiction. They are mental dysfunctions that we find some sense of peace, some solace within. They make us feel both terrible and terrific at once. They fill us with dread and with desire. They are states of being that we both cheer and despair.

I write for love and I write of love. Love inspires my writing and writing leads me to understand love. In order to be a good writer you need two essential elements, love and truth. If your writing is done in anything but love the reader will know it. If you fudge the truth your readers will know it and all your efforts will be for naught. Writers suffer for the love of their work a dual mental condition. I think I’ll coin it … Lufian Writian. Add it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Afraid of Ebola

“Aren’t you afraid of Ebola?” I’m asked.

“Sure,” I said but no more or less than I am afraid of anything else people carry. It’s why I don’t go out as much. It’s why I don’t date and mass with the collective and such. It’s why I Namaste instead of shake, why I nod but don’t touch. I have seen the way you live. I have witnessed you leave the bathroom stall, facilities un-flushed, and waltz on by the sink bank as if it were nothing but a wall. You don’t even bother to glance in the mirror long enough to see the wedge of toilet paper behind your ear, stuck there when you were wiping the meat sweats from your neck.  So, no, Ebola isn’t one of my biggest concerns. What I am concerned with are bigger things like …

Watching the world around me descend into madness. I feel as if I am witness to the collapse of a civilization and as Democracy burns on a sinking ship of endless greed and bottomless need all I can do is play … because I see no salvation.

I am afraid that the same people who fear Ebola more than the war machine that’s selling tanks to our police are going to be the ones that hand all of our rights over to Johnny Law. Because all I can see is you parasites sucking the tainted information that the media has running through the veins of our nation and you have grown bloated to bursting on the bile of lies. Truth is … The police are killing us out here, with impunity and with very little in the way of repercussion.

I fear what they are stripping away little by little because of your righteous belief in an invisible god. Today it’s the hard fought and hard won women’s right to choose what she does with her body. Once that cotter pin is pulled and he castle nut works its way loose of the bolt, what disaster awaits while Justice travels 70 down I35 at night in the rain? She is already blind.

Though, she is not as blind as you. That’s what I fear. Not a virus that an insect can give me just as easily as my neighbor on the public transit. I fear your blind staring eye that is only capable of absorbing the lies that they tell you to eat. I fear your panicked rush when those with power push your face from the teat. I fear that you do not know you are a slave so you do not see the cage and when the structure collapses you would rather eat me, than meat.

I fear your lack of education and I fear your passive procrastination. I fear your passing of ignorance to your kids and your utter lack of passion for their futures. I fear the signs of the times that tell me Orwell wasn’t just a writer but instead a prophet. The all seeing eye isn’t just a symbol its a message that the slope we’ve slipped on is already too far gone. And the pyramid upon which it rests isn’t a symbol of strength is a scheme that’s become a theme in all things profitable. I fear because these days the rich don’t just get richer they also get to paint the picture that history will record as truth while the rest of us simply fade on the page like poorly erased pencil marks.

“Aren’t you afraid of Ebola,” I’m asked?

“Sure,” I replied, “sure I am.”