Becoming Whole Again Or How to Grow Old Gracefully

So here we are, at the end of our childhoods. We ostensibly lay out our portfolios on the ground for our peers to see. "Witness here, the marvelous upward mobility of my diversified shares. Notice the upswing towards the end of the 1990's. Be humbled at the dramatic drop things took a few years ago, when they told us we lost everything."

"I can't sit here and lie to you guys, it's been a rough climb. I don't know if I'll ever truly break out of this. But somewhere inside, the rebuilding started, and it spread around, and gained momentum here, and lost ground over there, but on its way it created a life of it's own. And now that I look back, I see this new person, constructed out of pain. Constructed out of the will to carry on, when everything around me was breaking down. Of course, I took some time off. I watched TV in the dark. I let the bright green shake of the Twin Peaks graphic overshadow my living room as I listened to the imitation fireplace grind on, as my roommate shagged his girlfriend in the next room."

"I accepted failure as my dietary staple. I obsessed about negative outcomes, burning bridges. I drove over potholes, after dreaming about how I would die in one. I vacuumed up emotion from the carpet and stuffed it inside my brain to fester."

"I outwardly told myself I wouldn't make it, i wrote my own ending to my own Shakespearean tragedy. I set up writes of passage, goals not to meet. I failed in a glorious smoldering of my former self."

"I came out of this funk, and peered around at the carnage, junked up cars would hurl themselves at me, revenge for staying inside the oven too long. I realized how much catch-up I had to play."

Josiah reached over and poured himself another Styrofoam cup full of coffee. The oak floors whispered intently as he stealthfully slinked across the floor. He cleared his throat, coughed and continued. The rest of the group sat quietly intently awaiting each word as If it were a manifestation of their own destiny. They had all visited the places Josiah had. They had all experienced the mind numb brain death after a serious let down. After the economy crashed, and the military took over. After they rooted out the dissenters through the media. When on a cold Portland morning you could hear the shots fired in the public outhouses. Reflecting back the implosive corrosion of justice. When anyone who had ever shouted loud enough hunkered down and began the slow process of dumbing thoughts down, sedating oneself into submission, lying in the dark on the couch, seeping up the shit and detritus of a culture. Midnight movies whirred in their brains, feverishly concocting the literature for the next generation.

Josiah continued, although he sensed the resentment for his success in the air. They knew what he had achieved. They knew how to achieve it. They just still felt castrated by the machine.

"When I looked around at how scared everyone was, the main point to my life that had been missing for so long came back to me all of a sudden. Not as some sort of divine intervention, or any kind of light, or anything, but a stark realization, a fulfillment in the back of your brain, as it floats over all outcomes, and they become more positive, the outcomes. Like you can envision a better world. Then you start fighting you fight with yourself, because the battle is all in there"

He points at his head at this point, while the others attempt to cheer but are held back by their own fear. Yelps can be heard under the surface of closed mouth, and denied esophageal passages.

"Being a free-thinking, self sufficient, sentient being isn't the liberating thing it used to be" "People don't want you to be that way, they want to perpetually keep you a victim, to keep buying, keep consuming, and never be satisfied, no matter what the brand name is, If you don't believe in your self, you'll keep on shoving that shit down your throat." "Throw it all away, throw it up, you don't need it, your stronger than that, there is a way out."

A few hands sheepishly went up, after the roaring treble of faint handclaps faded to the back of the room, soaked into the oak wood.

With the close of the book, Josiah convened the meeting, inspiring everyone to leave out the large door into the inviting foyer of the hall. Weeks would go by before they would meet again, in secret, on this the 12th night of the 11th month of the year that we cannot say.

Receiving The Reverend, Losing Refrigeration

A Stopgap, a placeholder, something to elongate time with. To make those white pages not seem so white, at 3am, when the thoughts come to you, in-between the partition of dream and sleep. When you awake and you’re not sure which set of rules to adhere to.

When the refrigerator breaks in the middle of the night, and your throwing out produce, dairy products, setting out beer in the cold air. When you go back to sleep and your with someone but your not with someone, when your alone in your own head. When you wake up and your with someone but you thought you were alone for awhile.

It is several days later when you finally picked up where you left off. You try to place the moment when your life was spliced. You’ve re read the same pamphlet that stares up at you off of the floor like it should have more significance than it does. But it doesn’t. The whole event was a sham, a marketing scheme. Life edits itself again, gleaming white on the editing table. The silvery dials reflect off of your dreams. Life is getting too possessive.

You trail off into cliché, being wary of the pulpy margins of your brain, from where they edited out the parts that strayed too far from either side of spectrum. They judged this spectrum with the tests. “Tests of faith” they told you, and you believed them. You wanted so much to believe. But now you’ve thrown everything out. “It was because of the refrigerator”, you tell yourself, but you know it was just another flubbed editing mark, a too obvious cue mark, cigarette burn in the upper right hand corner of the emulsion that became your life. You can only remember that day and what you saw. You can remember for a moment before they do a manual dump, flushing all the data out of your memory, until you focused on the fridge again, before you logged on to the website one more time. Got one last look, before they change the cue marks on you again. And you’re awake. What remains is the events of the day it all started, when you were resurrected.

At times it appeared as an unfathomable mass. A chunky collection of baldheads, simple cue balls, with necks craned upwards. At times it resembled a mass demonstration, lacking the palatable anger, passion or any sort of heightened emotion. For these were the disciples, instantly created in the microwave of modern communication. Instantly transformed, these heads now had an obligation, a passion they couldn’t articulate with words, but through a continuous circuit, a dense wire that screamed out of their collective agony in the anticipation of the Reverend’s Appearance.

The silence that echoed from either side of the Radisson parking lot was like the void left by the death of a loved one, the emptiness someone you’ve counted on being there for at least the next few years leaves behind, like an unwanted sock.

For the reverend, in his silver reflected tower, had delivered intimacy found in the easy exploration of another’s eyes; the hyperactive twitch reflex shot out when one realizes one is looking at another stark naked, beaming back pride exponentially.

So when the whir of the hyper reflected glass windows motorized mechanism initiated the momentum of the doors to slowly open, an inaudible uneasiness lifted from the crowd. Martha felt I too, her entire body quivered in the immediate anticipation that followed. This carried on as her eyes gazed up at the chandelier in the lobby of the Radisson, with motors still whirring, removing the last of the open windows from sight.

The grooves of black velour on the sign at the foyer to the auditorium were flecked with a cheap silver paint, highlighting the embossed plastic leters “Welcome Reverend Reevers”. As the faithful marched in to the ballroom, passing by the velour of the mauve red curtains, they focused intently on the riser at the center of the stage. Instead of a usual cross or main symbol, there stood a small laptop, with chunky blue wires that flowed into a large metal box, dimmed lights could be seen in the box, that hummed with an energy system powerful enough just to generate light. The roar of the generator reverberated throughout the room, bouncing the sound through the acoustical tiles on the ceiling, reflecting back on the shapeless faces that graced row after row of receiving Reeverites.

It had been so long since she had heard anyone speak, that to you then the sound of another’s voice seemed frightening since it did not come from herself, and most certainly did not come from the Reverend. It took until the first few stanzas of the Reverend’s greeting for the appointed chorus members to take the stage in their robes of mauve and gold, stood out from the rows of white sheets, shaved heads with the occasional tattoo, nick or surgical mark.

The haze begins to form around your vision; peripheries fade into ether, as you remember the ominous steel contraption set up in the middle of the room. Your remember faintly how all the energy present in the room that day seemed to circulate around it, the followers joining the swelling magnetism in chants and memorized stanzas of rotund diphthongs, trailing off of the alveolar region of the mouth, joining the cacophony in the air, eased into the steel contraption in the center of the room. It’s then that you notice the reverend, appearing in the glass above the amphitheatre. Everyone sees him, but communicates through the syllabic monotony of sound. Amorphous tones combine to form a holistic heartfelt tribute to the engulfing power of the reverend. He holds his arms up now, upwards towards the sky, silver robes matching silver hair.

He’s in the center of the swarming sound, blending in with it, hes right in front of all of you, he’s the focus, he’s the one you’ve missed so dearly, hes the last face you see, before the gauzy white vision takes over. He’s the last comforting pillow that smothers your breath. It’s the last sound you hear, the amorous whole tones that engulf your heart, and caresses the roof of your mouth when you take your last breath, and finally hear the refrigerator cut off.