Does the numbness arrive too easy? All while the harder fought sharpness is dulled and delayed by these conditioned repetitions and twisted desires?

With wasted youth being a part time drunken bard falling behind, will the middle-aged sage encroach as I stay confined to this thought enraged cage? After all, this summer I’ll be old enough to run for the highest executive office in the land. Truly, a terrifying concept.

It does feel harder to maintain an edge, as of late. And while my own story and choices certainly hold their roles in this personal production- I cannot help but wonder whether some part of the reduction is being felt a bit more universally. The overcast of senseless hum and static, these constant clouds that we, wildly enough, provide financial backing for despite the many lack of benefits being reaped by the larger crowds. So, these superficially sustained victors assigned by unrestrained baseness and vanity, while foresight is damned and punished. All consumed beyond capacity while peril plagues the souls just hoping to remain sane and pragmatic.  

Oh, how to rectify so much outward division while another level and metaphysical divisiveness reside right in my very heart and mind?

I don’t suspect an answer to be forthcoming and simplistic. Well, perhaps just not forthcoming. But I have regularly discovered on the here or there occasion, that simplicity works quite nicely as irrefutably rhetoric for society’s complexities. Not that something needs be correct to be effective. Nor, does it need to be wrong or reprehensible in order to attain quantifiable impact. Each question might find answer. Might even be a different one for every time asked.

I suppose I’ve been pondering the differences between acceptance and surrender, and if such delineation even exists. And along adjacent lines, whether defiance and delusion are more alike than something more opposing. Either way, commit to the bit, right? Or was it adapt and overcome? Or both the same and neither of these, or any other assortment of lines void of punchlines?

I do know that this is not enough. And I’ve always known that. This bare minimum of digging about the sentience and soul is but scarcest maintenance and exercise in order to keep the scribe spark alive. And as this stone has been bled to its wrinkled state of the current evening, I think of the precipice upon which I dance, inebriated upon my own imagery. It must be more, or less, but I cannot sustain my wit and wisdom questing upon a weekly ramble. For whatever it robs of or from me, the true crime is what is taken from you, dear reader. For your time, something worthwhile ought to be wrought and wrestled here. For here I sit, think upon myself while the whole celestial spinning rock of ours resides on this precarious cliff of fermenting civil unrest.  

For there is a line between individualism and inability to enact selflessness, though not always on the level of doomed fate. But there is energy spent in keeping awareness away from megalomania, while understanding the devotion to empathy has limits when confined to our existences in these earthen forms. And there is fresh challenge imposed technologically in the attempted escape of loneliness, that eternal individual ache, and succumbing to the synthesized alternatives abundant and aimed to turn our brain chemistry into some higher profit margin for small chunks of populations that have likely never danced with angelic abandon in the entirety of their lives. Or at the very least, can no longer remember how.

And supposing further along the thought line, that must be a fear churning within the writer casting words now upon ye. That in all this life I’ve lived, I am forgetting how to be among the living.

An exaggeration, perhaps, but that is the business of fear, is it not? To impose an aggrandized projection of negative hope, inherited via evolution as some life sustaining strategy. But where as our less developed ancestors minded their ambitions in order to assess and avoid mortal risk, our modern abomination of the formerly mentioned drive creates as seeming disconnect from the elements that make up the actualities of mortal existence. All while the larger masses absolve to reduction or total abstinence of archetypal adjunction just so they can make it through another day without total emotional destruction.

Hard times for impossible dreams, eh Sancho?

Yet, it is imperative humanity to march through hell for heavenly causes. Of that, somehow, I am always certain.

There was a line read a few days back that has hover about my mind, because of how it hovers about our times- even if originally written four-fifths of a century ago.

‘It is movements that make leaders and not leaders movements.’

Now, am I egotistical enough to think myself some sort of leader in days yet to come? Of course, I am. Do I have any idea what to do or how to go about doing it? Not really, no. Probably not really at all. And yet, I know there is a need within so many of us in these moments to bring about some sort of altercation to set an ulterior path beyond the ones we seemed doomed to go down, if not halfway there already. Even when disagreeing upon specifics, that itch, that urge, that constant and almost silent confirmation many things are amiss and must find some kind of rectification before all that was once benign bursts forth with uncontainable malignancy.

Yet, I know, that thinking too big is a trap in and of itself. Not to be totally stricken from mental accounting, but far too often gets worshipped as a false deity of the future. That, or becomes some abomination of aggressive ideology that berates, befuddles or bombs out entirely the threads of positive hope that pull this heaping mass of humanity forward.

The big picture is nice and all, and as a dynamic work, only grows in depth and beauty. But it is the next step that makes the difference. A singular movement onward from where we were, to just the slightest bit further in any sort of direction. For from that first next step, the options for the next will arrive, and I’m sure you thoughtful lot can see how this all becomes a journey after the accumulation of such movements.

This is a first step for the writer. But the marching in place has served very little for a long while now. Other strides must be continually sought, through fierceness and failure. Ever onward, to unreachable stars and such. Just because the Man of La Mancha didn’t dream up the space shuttle, didn’t mean that there wouldn’t some day be one.