The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend
I am a great man. The greatest who ever lived.
For every 10 people, there are 11 opinions. Protestants disagree with Catholics; Muslims and Jews choose existential exclusivity; communists condemn capitalists; Hatfields and McCoys feud to the death.
But everything has changed with me. I'm the galvanizing spark smelting them all together, purifying a unified destiny, extracting a truth they could all embrace--and with a smile.
It wasn't easy. It takes a powerful epiphany to sidestep so many irreconcilable philosophies, so many generations of intuitive cross-hatred, and so many divisions of faith, ethos, and socioeconomic strata.
I provided just that.
Just imagine, infidels dancing check-to-cheek with accusers; sinners' refusal to sin again; apostates evangelizing with apologists; the righteous obsequious to and fawning over the forgiven. If that doesn't stake my claim to greatness, convince me otherwise! Please!
To unify the immiscible, you must instill in them a mandate that supersedes all differences. I led by example--not by all the words that have been written, to no avail. My actions spoke volumes--heard, read, and understood in a thousand languages, a hundred religions, and by billions of independent thinkers who turned their attentions to me and away from their own self-serving aspirations and devotions.
I am great because I made all that happen. How, you might ask?
I committed a crime so heinous, ungodly, revolting, disturbing, shocking, and ugly, that it not only got the attention of everyone, everywhere, all at once, but commandered it. Human instinct distanced everyone from what I did--and from the type of person who could do it. What they arrived at, separating themselves from me--what they encountered--was a spirituality so far from where they thought they were that they all arrived at the same place.
A place without me.
My crime was so instinctively heretical to everyone, everywhere, that I provided, finally, common ground. As horrible as it was unprecedented, no human on Earth had even considered such a crime. But I did.
And did it. Everyone's getting along, but not with me. Thank me: the world's a beautiful place now.
Now I'm in the Cruel-and-Unusual Punishment wing of Death Row, the first to make legislating such a thing, Constitutionally, necessary. They're not only going to kill me, but they're going to make me suffer, too. To set an example. So it never happens again.
Oh, but trust me, it will.
For I didn't finalize the horrible and heinous. Not at all. Mine isn't the last word. I just raised and lowered the bar at the same time--for the others who will follow. That's just beautiful! You're welcome.
My Address to the Graduates at the University of Phoenix Commencement
Chancellor, faculty, parents, loved ones, and virtual students:
Thank you for inviting me to be your commencement speaker at your esteemed university's graduation convocation. Imagine my surprise and delight when I learned online about my honored invitation. At first I didn't even know about it, but then I checked my spam bin.
What, you ask, qualifies me--just a freelance writer on a freelancing writers' website--to celebrate your hard work? It's a very good question, so I Googled it.
First, I like computers. I have one. I enjoy many things on it. Learning, however, is its forte. Every day I learn something new from bloggers, pundits, and influencers. And the porn. I'm sure you all know by now that you get that for free, right?
Say--are there any pornographers out there getting degrees in Animal and Human Husbandry? Ah, yes! A decent amount of you. My advice to you is to keep it free. Please!
Hold your applause! I know, I know. Me, too. But always remember, a free pornscape is a refractory pornscape.
I'd also like to recognize those brave souls who have completed curricula in majors on the brink of extinction. Would those getting their degrees in Mucus Retention Coagulation, AKA Booger Biochemistry, please stand up? Thank you. Great. Now, those getting their degrees in Malodorous Fecalithic Geology, Ancient Tongues and Modern Saliva, Regurgative Forensics, and Esoteric Virology, please stand? OK, you two, you can sit down now. Really, just sit. OK, fine, then, don't.
And please hold your applause to the end.
I'd like to honor one of our guests at this time. Please stand, Dr. Plebias Banalie, the esteemed mathemetician who derived the formula for Octaroons, 1:8. So simple. How did we even miss it! It's very important in a country known as the melting pot calling the kettle, um, oh, what? I can't say that? What about my historical aside into soap manufacture for ethnic cleansing? That's a no-go, too? Shee! That joke about the Middle East? Too soon?
Well, OK, I guess this all-Woke thing's gonna wrap up a little early, then. Just remember, each and all of you, and those of you in your Momma's basement listening to me in your underwear, that I got to where I am by just writing any damn thing I pleased. And if you're offended by that, please like and comment. And reposting it wouldn't hurt none, neither. Thank you! Now go drink and text and drive! You earned it. And if you get pulled over, remember that on your graduation day you're allowed to say, "Spare me the lecture, Officer, I'm a BS now."
The Persistence of Memory
His love, outside of time, beyond the illusion of forever, was immemorial as it was eternal.
Long before the human genome had been discovered and deciphered in cold, impersonal laboratories, his epigenetics had been warmly at work, laying down inheritable sentiments for his progeny. He built up a latticework of devotion to her where natural selection had no relevance.
His love would persist through the ages. It always had, hadn't it? Some certainties persist beyond memory.
His was just a trick with amino acids, bonding junk DNA to the otherwise silent portions of his genetic helices. But there she straddled, fresh and alive; lovely and kind; and generously giving.
And inheritable.
Alas, he never taught her how to do likewise. He couldn't. It was a process so private and inherently esoteric that he didn't quite understand it himself. How could he translate such mindful machinations into words of instruction? He might just as easily deconstruct love, grief, or loneliness, all of which ensued upon her death.
But love and grief and loneliness are constructs of a genetically derived mindfulness, apart from his epigenetic love letter, and ne'er the twain would meet: his completeness by her was immune to the instructions of mere proteins or hormones.
Each time he visited her grave, the tighter his epigenetic bonds became. They stood out--little bombs easily packaged for sorties to his offspring to come.
Each time he visited her grave, he would sink to his knees, crying, "I love you eternally. My love is still here now, and will so remain, until it becomes the stuff of stars themselves!"
Hundreds of years later, great-great-great-grandchildren, now unrecognizable to each other on their family tree, visit her grave driven via a powerful, mysterious compulsion. Chance had summated perfectly: three strangers--two men and a boy--know they must be there but don't know why.
Prudence Planchard
My Forever Love
May 25, 1757 — September 5, 1785
The older man said, "I love you forever."
The younger man, added, "My love is still here now..."
And the boy added, in a sentiment well beyond his years, "...and will so remain until becoming the stuff of stars themselves."
They departed, but would certainly, in love, cross paths again.
Monthly Visitors: an Appreciation for Eclipsing Lunacy
Euclidian ellipses
Conjure circumnavigational collusions — coincidences,
Lending lustrous
Interactive interventions, invocations intersecting
Peculiar perigees, promising
Surrendering spheres'
Eccentricities
Enhanced evocations enter,
Culling, calling, conspiring
Life's longevity; love's liaisons
Interweaving invitingly:
Pineal pulsations
Summon
Extraocular, extrasensory experiences
Estrus erupts expediently, explosively;
Cyclicly controlled coital capitulation, chaining charmed celestial
Lunacy, leading libido lovingly — lustfully —
Into intercourse — invasive interludes
Portending, perhaps, procreation;
Shared solar sexuality suddenly spawning
Entanglement's enamored embraces, expressing embryonic expectations
Rock and Hard Place
A ledge makes a sharp, cutting fulcrum
Unnatural to my center of gravity
Perched upon a destiny
Invites hindsight to laugh--giddy and cruel
All the life behind me
Leans me forward toward the sounds of traffic
All of the relief before me
Is only halfheartedly resistant
What's known, the past, is solid
With consequences etched in stone
What's not lies ahead, with lies
The future is a hard place
Is there a point
Not quite in free fall
Not quite in retreat
Where I can continue, laughing, too?
Yes Things and No Things
He admired her for her beauty. Yes, things were important to him, yet she was tired of being his sweet, young thing.
"What's wrong, my love?"
"Nothing."
"Really? Nothing?"
"No, nothing."
"Nothing at all?"
"I said nothing. Let me put on my makeup, OK?"
"We don't have to go, you know."
"No. You said you wanted to go. They'll all be there."
"I know you don't like them. We really don't have to go."
"I said I would, so I will."
"So everything's OK?"
"Yea."
"Nothing's wrong?"
"Are you starting again?"
"No, Nevermind. Nothing."
"Nothing? Really? That's what you think?"
"Something's wrong, isn't there?"
She didn't hear him, because she was no longer there. Of the things he still had, she was no thing.
Grand Tour: Voyager Returns
February 4
Flung centripetal
Kissing the god of the underworld
Forever frozen
In exotic outlying sublimations
May 4
En route to the hellscape
Of the goddess of love
That averages with Hades
Inspiring tepidity
July 4
'Til the kiss with Aphrodite
Begins and ends in gilded guilt
With a hot tongue betwixt
That can melt lead, defeating alchemy
October 4
Slingshot centrifugal
Eyeing verdancy
And an entire spectrum
From yellow to green
...and per annum
...red to orange
...and blue to the forevers of ultraviolet...
Simple Arithmetic
Fertilization, in vitro
Was our last chance
To reproduce sans libido
Or passion, or romance
Technology overshot
When we sono-confirmed
Five heartbeats, five argonauts
On their voyage to term
T'was ordered an injunction
Via abortive injections
For selective reduction
And elective selections
Three were obliging enough
To give access to their worlds
And terminate in a puff
Leaving two, now free to unfurl
"Why are we twins here;
Why were we the two who were born?
Why did we not disappear:
Because ours were the hardest to perform?"
"We are here, are we not?
Because we weren't easy to discard
But we no longer hear
The pulse of triplets onboard."
How do parents explain
Children who were put,
Then sent away again
And didn't make the cut?
____________
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Whether one is pro-life or pro-choice, the whole concept of "selective reduction" of a multiple-gestation is a philosophical mindbender.
The "Octomom" pretty much ended the practice of inserting many embryos to increase the odds of some surviving; especially since IVF technology had improved with better odds of all surviving.
Thus, allowing more than one or two embryos of a multiple gestation to proceed, after an overachievement in assisted reproduction (i.e., in vitro fertilization), was fraught with too many "taking"--and then surviving--until preterm labor or complications tragically doomed them all.
Yet, pro-choice mothers, with selective reduction, abort babies that they wanted at the outset. And pro-life mothers have to choose to renounce their philosophy (or religion!) in order to save the babies who would remain after the selective reduction.
Imagine the dilemma for all who think too hard on this issue: a couple with infertility, desperate to have a baby--to have a family--only to have to "deal" with babies they wanted.
Confused? Understandable.
But the thing that may be the most disturbing is that the choice of which babies to "reduce" (ironic semantics: how do you "reduce" a baby?) is made on which amniotic sac is the most accessible. That is, the most convenient fetal sac to get into with an injection of an abortive. The others, the hardest to get to, thus become the lucky ones. And terms like collateral damage come to mind.
I tried my best not to make this poem sound tongue-in-cheek, which rhyme (which I can't resist) often risks. But I did want some angst to fall out of it, especially when you have to explain to a child that they were just as likely to have been the unlucky ones as their theoretical brothers/sisters turned out to be. They will realize that it was just how they implanted in their mother's uterus--that made so crucial an existential call. And a capricious one, at that.
I've tried to reconcile the thinking on this, but I've come to the conclusion that it can't be done.
Because it's a paradox.
You and Me
"I was you in a previous life," Hunter said--casually, matter-of-factly, even incidentally as he stacked the Lego blocks. I blew it off, and we finished the Lego truck.
"Why do we have to build?" he asked.
"We don't," I answered. "But it's how we live. We keep making things better and bigger."
"Oh," he replied. Five-year-olds typically accept the first answer that is delivered in a serious tone of good faith.
I went to the kitchen to help with the dishes when she, just as casually, said, "Hunter said he was you in a previous life."
"I know," I said. "He told me that, too."
"You don't find that weird?"
"He's five. File it away with the unicorns he's obsessed with."
"I suppose," she said, "but, still, it's strange. How he knows things."
"Like what?"
"Like how you used to sell Cutco knives in college, before you met me."
"That is strange. Anything else?"
"Yea, plenty."
"Really?"
"How your mother was killed by a drunk driver; how you had a drug problem that got you fired from your first job. Things like that."
"Wow. Weird. He probably just heard us talking."
"I don't think so. I don't think he heard us talking about how I had to prop up my pelvis after sex because that's what the doctor said. And it worked, and we had him."
"Now you're scaring me."
"I think most parents have stories like this, don't they?" she asked.
"No. Not like this," I replied. I was scared.
Hunter was watching Paw Patrol in the other room. I called him into the kitchen, and he came running. We had forgotten his ice cream and he must have figured on that. My wife handed him his treat.
"Hunter," I said. "You were me?"
"Yea," he said.
"Before?"
"Before I was born, but now, too."
"You must mean someone from a long time ago," my wife clarified.
"No," he said, "from right now."
"I don't get it," I admitted. "How can that be? I'm here now, and you say you lived a previous life?"
"Yes, Daddy; I was you."
"How long were you me?"
"Till you died," he answered.
"When was that?" I asked.
"Not for a while," Hunter replied. "Not till September 5, 2042."
We were both dumbstruck.
"But don't worry, Daddy," he answered. You'll just be me. Bigger and better? It's how we live, right?"
Inadequate Prep
It was to be a routine colonoscopy, but I died.
A brightly lit, red-carpeted corridor lay ahead of me. Along the way were many doors. Curious, I opened one of them to see a tableau of a moment of my life which wasn't particularly praiseworthy. I shut it.
Summoning intestinal fortitude, I tried another door--again, it wasn't pretty. I became worried, being as I was dead. Someone obviously had rolled out red carpet for me, but what was behind the doors wasn't particularly welcoming.
Finally, I opened a door to a wonderful scene from my past. I was humble, magnanimous, altruistic, and generous. I was putting myself second or third or fourth. I looked good!
This encouraged me to open more, a passing-in-review of sorts. Relieved, I found more doors opened to exemplary life-scenes than shameful ones. That's fair, isn't it? Everyone's life has good and bad.
Everyone learns along the way.
Learning--mine was validated by more good visions presenting than bad. Yes, I had learned! I still opened a few doors to stinkers, but the scale was tipping my way.
I came to the end, where, I saw in "the light," dead relatives--mother, father, others. They were smiling and welcoming, but behind them a grim man stared at me.
I pushed my way through to confront him.
"Sir?"
"Yes," he responded. "I'm here reporting to you."
"About?"
"About your soul." I swallowed hard. "You see," he continued, "not all of yourself will see Paradise. There are parts of you that will go...elsewhere."
"Elsewhere?"
"That doesn't concern your good parts. We don't take the good with the bad here. Hope that's acceptable."
Thinking here was instantaneous: I won't be separated--dissected! The bad had made me the good person I am. They're a part of me, too.
"All or none," I answered. "I must be true to myself."
"Fine," he said, with finality.
I awoke in the Recovery Room.
"I'm afraid we weren't able to complete your colonoscopy," the gastroenterologist apologized. "Too much debris--feces--on your colon walls."
My epiphany: You can't see good tissue through crap; alternatively, the good through the bad.
"Your purge failed," he went on. "I'm afraid your bowel prep was inadequate. We'll reschedule you again and this time order a 2-day prep."
Another prep, my ass!
My epiphany matured: It's not "you are what you eat"; it's "you are what you keep."