TOXINS

He felt that if he touched them they would turn him into a toxic substance, unnamable and sharp in its ability to cut through to the very heart.

Very well, he thought, I will have nothing to do with them. They are little shits after all, why worry about it.

He had thought long and hard about this before committing himself to the very path that his thought implicated. If he was not going to touch them and their toxicity then what was he going to get used to, as he had gotten used to them? This was the chief dilemma. He had to find a substitute!

Of course, there were plenty of toxicities to choose from; a regular smorgasbord of them, all laid out, not yet tagged by scientists but there, just the same, ready to poison the mind or heart as it perceived a great adventure for itself. "It must be that they have seen the very futility of ever dreaming anything and will, literally, kill anyone with the temerity to dream." It was his first encounter with the treachery in life and how it appeared one thing but then revealed itself to be something completely different. Bored human nature, with nothing important to do. Ah, the dangerous animal, that. So, he kept busy so he wouldn't be pulled down into this awful hell world he perceived coming from the wrathful others.

They did not have weapons per se. That was the first thing to notice. But they had some primitive tribal connection as must occur in the middle-east, among those who decide that the path of terrorism is better than that of democracy. It's not something they happen on rationally but it leaks to them by the other tribe members who, perhaps, are too afraid to act out their thoughts.

The sinister women constituted one branch of the tribal tree and he, after awhile, became very suspicious of them as he passed them on his way to the other side of the encampment. It was by a shallow river, surrounded by low rolling hills and blackbirds. He often put his head in the river and would rear up only to find himself staring into the eyes of a blackbird.

"Ah, to get away, get away, what a beautiful sound that makes!" And he did want to get away without question.

They were like little magnets always applying a kind of pressure; now positive, now negative but in their own way, their own time. He could never figure it out.

When the best story he had prepared went bust they were right there ready to shore up the fact that the story was wrong for him. "You are not that story. You are the story we have here for you," and they related this tale that he did not recognize as his own. In fact, it was so foreign, so alien to his sense of things that he wondered who they were referring to. "It certainly isn't me," he thought. "No, they are talking about some lost relative."

He had learned many thing. He didn't know it all. But, it struck him as bizarre that they would want him to abandon much of the knowledge he had acquired in favor of their won superstitions. This was very strange to him and he began to suspect things at that point. "What? You want me to carry the load of your ignorance for you and get rid of the precious knowledge I have acquired? Never!" And he felt very good, very powerful after this encounter and slept well that night.

They were, ultimately, one of many, many fearful groups that populated the land at that time. It took him a long time to see through this, that their animus went to something more profound than mere dissatisfaction with him. That generally they were afraid of a whole way of life disappearing and becoming irrelevant in the type of world now being built. This was something he had inured himself to but they, those who judged him, obviously were freshly caught with the terrible perception that what they knew was meaningless, was backward and of no use to anyone. It was at that point they started to plot.

And a plot can be a treacherous thing. He remembered the story he heard of the wife who plotted to kill her husband by hiring some lunk for $300. And she wanted him to have no pain and for it to appear as an accident. "Oh yes, that can be arranged, " the lunk had said. Once the transition was made she disappeared and figured her life had changed now. The plot would be carried out and she would be free, apparently. That's what she wanted.

The lunk turned out to be an uncover cop and grainy cameras caught her shock when she was arrested. She threw herself on a bed and demanded that the cops shoot her, "I'm better off dead, now, than alive....I can't go through this!" But, they simply handcuffed her and led her away, bawling and moaning, hoping it was some nightmare that she would soon awaken from.

The husband was later interviewed and had a slight smile on his face and kept shaking his head, "wow, I didn't know she had it in her. Wow, imagine that. Man, that beats all." And one couldn't help but detect a kind of pride in the man as thought his woman had proven her worth in some way. "But," he suddenly said in a very serious manner, "didn't she think of the kids. What would the kids do without their daddy?"

The only test of freedom is whether we are able to truly choose our entanglements. Not being able to choose then freedom is a farce because everything is conditioned by the loathsomeness of the entanglement we neither want nor willingly give ourselves to. That is why people flee. It was a nation of fleeing people trying to find the entanglement that would be perfect for them, that would require no profound downpayment of emotion but simply a few oaths or pretended loyalties. Always, there was someone who took the entanglement very seriously; the dangerous one. Most called it, "life, it's just life and it pulls you along through its weird web."

They are the ones who stare into the core of the organizing principle and see nothing. So, they totter around like petty tyrants having to tidy everything up and make the people straight and good. "If I don't look out for them, who will?" Says the tyrant, puffed up by a sudden success and, now, destined to ride things through to a bitter end. He will take many with him and there is little that wisdom can do. (A fight breaks out at this point, too bloody to relate. They all survive but are changed and decide to mend their ways...)

The backward among them are transfixed as they were in all ages. This fact astounded the man but it was verifiable without question. They had become exactly as he had predicted many years before, yet, he felt no pride in such an observation. Their fatal mistake? They believed what was empty had substance? They believed they could fabricate a nice substantial foundation for themselves after they had destroyed everything in sight. So, at that point, life became a joke. And the, in slow increments, it caught up to them and they were driven into a kind of madness.

Back to Top
June 2004 Notebook
May 2004 Notebook
April 2004 Notebook
March 2004 Notebook
February 2004 Notebook
Back to Oasis