Day 15 - The Twisted Staff

Not ten feet away stands a twisted, almost druidic stick, about six feet high, curling upwards in the corner of my bedroom until its upper end finds rest on the wing of a red dragon statue. The dragon rests with its ten-inch wings spread wide, a cone of artificial fire fixed in its mouth and a copy of LIFE Magazine from July 1969 settled safely behind it. And the magazine that features Charles Lindbergh's last message to a premoon world in turn blocks an 140-year-old textbook, a forest-green geography tome that describes central Africa in racist terms. Eminently druidic.

Day 14 - Almost White

The new sun glitters off the shingles of my house, making them appear almost white in the light of a parched dawn. In this dry morning the colorful fireworks of last night are a distant memory. The birds chirp away, hopeful that the cacophony of human explosions has died away forever.

But we are not backing down for good. Civilization will prevail, for better or worse, and the flames that now echo in the streets of Damascus and Baghdad will continue to erupt in American skies for as long as man draws breath. Trust freedom to come with bright bombs.

Day 13 - Hemingway

The sun also rises, wrote Hemingway. He was proud enough of this phrase to choose it for the title of a classic that I haven't read. I don't know why I haven't done so yet. Everything keeps getting in the way.

It all seemed so simple. I would balance logic with wonder, statistics with imagination, cold policy with the love boiling out of my words. I would catch up with my life tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. And then that word blurred into a month, two months, and now, as the sun rises, I am writing to make sense of it all.

Day 12 - Months

It has now been months since I touched this page. In those months I chased the wrong words, longing for a utopia of comprehension, a world that I could understand. I am obsessed with eliminating uncertainty, with taming the world and making it a thing that can be probed to the core. I long to pry out the deepest of secrets and discern the truths that lie in every mystery. 

But to know all would be to become God; to pretend to know all would destroy my soul. And a sense of wonder defines the greatest people I know. 

Day 11 - Chester's

Purple coffee stains on the ebony, faux age-stained table. Angry white scratches on the underside, maybe somebody sharpening their bowie knife on the underside. Do people even own bowie knives at Gordon? I have never seen one. But I guess people don’t go flashing their knives around like nobody’s business.

Maybe they sit in kayaks in one of those wooded ponds, fishing just before dawn, gutting fish with their knives as they wait for another bite. Pescacidal sportsmen. Guttouchers.

Look at me. I can make up words! Whee.

In the old days this would have been normal. Now it’s original (?). 

Day 10 - Antirainbows

What when if lightning cut through the sky, it left an indelible mark, a jagged white scar across the heavens that served as a reminder of its violence? An antirainbow? A reminder that trouble continues to visit this world?

The formation of a relationship is itself an act of creation. Maybe God decided not to create lightning’s relationship with the sky in this way merely because we need no reminder of the existence of trouble. How queer, then, that we need reminders of hope.

Are we inherently pessimists? Or is it that while hope springs eternal, fear springs the greater? 

Day 09 - The Last Two Publication Dates Are Lies

The tide is rising. We can build, develop, gather nuts and bolts for the proverbial nuclear winters, but nothing can truly prepare us for the consequences of our actions. We are wishful thinkers, and we believe we will get the world we have always believed in.

Confirmation bias is a powerful force. But it cannot protect us from every truth.

One day we will wake up and find that we have lost something that we love even more dearly than our own rightness. And that loss, in the end, is the only thing that can ever save us from ourselves.