Towers of Love

    If you are lucky enough to find love, honor it, cherish it, don't let it go.  Never allow your career or your ambition to destroy it.  Love is our life's destination; without it, life has lost all meaning.  Lesser men build empires across continents, corporations that wound the planet and our egos, or devote their romantic interests to casual flings.  Real men build monuments of love.  These spiritual temples, consecrated from the pieces of relationships that only get stronger with work, can be likened to empire building or business expansion.  Working towards love is man's greatest aim.  Nothing does more for the world than a life devoted to molding the perfect relationship, for it not only benefits ourselves but our offspring and the generations ahead of us and the whole state of the world.  Without love we would live in a state of concrete objectivism, prejudice, and hate.  Often our psychology allows hate as a substitute for love, and as a motivator to conquer the vulnerable feelings it exposes us to.  You should never be afraid of it.  If enough people believed in it, it would conquer the world.  More people would trust in it, and our parents would teach us how to express it better.  Surely, such a utopia would replace all hostility with the benefits of love.  We have only to believe in this paramount feeling, and it will set us free.  Devote yourself to this highest divinity, dedicate your life to it.  You can do nothing better for the world than lending your belabored hands to building the towers of love. 

Church Lightning

The summer ends, autumn returns.  The rain rushes over the grass, a percussion of water.  That sound is like a call to arms, a whispering arousal echoing through the barns, signifying the harvest of Mabon.  Death, the destroyer of summer, blares through the clouds his terrifying roar, the roar of thunder with its accomplice, the subdued rain, announcing the end of a season. 

I rise from the chair, drop all my books, look out the window and crease my forehead.  It's time to go running, one last time, before the purge begins.  And so I run, soaked to the skin, eager to reach the church, that I might ring in the service of a titanic cleanse, to wash away the debris of those small-town gleeful evenings reverberating over the months.  The rain is light, it talks to me, it brings me stories from the north, which the little drops patter upon my skin every syllable, drenching me in a foreign mythology, one I'd forgotten after a nine month's absence. 

The church is empty, I run inside.  I round the spiral stairway, making my way to the top.  Lightning ignites the oculus, his awful eye- not that of God, but of his evil twin- opened by the blast.  The storm crashes over this holy ground of incense and myrrh, these pews of dedicated mahogany bent at the knee in submission.  The paintings on the walls hear the sound too, the booming sound of this seasonal apocalypse. 

I reach the top, out of breath.  The rain falls over the town in sheets of wind, sending the leaves off the trees in a merciful release.  Lightning strikes again, thunder bifurcates the realm.  Little bodies of feather come fleeting out of the darkness.  They crow at the world below, a frantic siren annihilating the Earth, warning those on the ground to take cover, or run. 

Money and Love

            Money and love are the two great motivators.  Few things cause us to strive more than earning a robust commission or the affection of someone we fancy.  Winning the game of money is just like conquering an object of affection; both require a persistent, calculated effort that often takes years to accomplish, if not the whole of one's life. 

Funny how having one seldom means having the other.  People with money aren't often known to have love lives, while those who do aren't known to be filthy rich.  It's like the universe wrote a rule that people who are financially well-off cannot love or be loved, while those who are revered as saints of compassion aren't allowed to have a lot of money.   

I suppose this has most to do with the virtue of charity; that people who give are generally loved more than those who don't.  The selfish are more likely to hoard their profits, causing them to be less loved.  Or, perhaps to be fairer, maybe it’s because they don't have as much time to love; maybe they are so busy earning their money that the opportunities to love pass them by.  Those who invest more time in relationships tend to have stronger ones.  Alas, and how money is often squandered on making a loved one happy!  For them, perhaps love is the greatest thing to spend it on.  If you value love more than cash, you will spend the cash on things that will help you attain it. 

Money and love are like two games with different rules.  You can't play them both.  And if you can, if you are one of the golden philanthropists of our weary time, you must be a genius at life.  Those who have neither are truly to be pitied, for it seems nothing in life would be worth living for, unless their motivation was a less common one.  Their motivations could lie elsewhere, such as in an art career, which tends to have poor earnings, or in globetrotting without any attachments.  To my mind, a true wanderer wouldn't be bound by either money or love.  Perhaps they are the happiest among us for it. 

Fear of the Unknown

When we don't have a name for something, or deny that what scares us has one, or decline to refer to what scares as by using it, it gives that something all the more power in controlling us.  We allow it to control us by erasing it from our thoughts and failing to understand it.  We are so afraid of it that we can't even call it by its name, for fear of its name cursing us, or some other supernatural farce.  Once we understand what it is, we are less reluctant to suppress its name, and it can no longer control us.  We break free from the chains of fear it binds us by, the weight on our shoulders collapsing in a swift revelation. 

It's a common tactic in horror and villainy to refer to a mysterious source of terror as not having a name.  The Hebrews couldn't call God by His name, for fear of his wrath; Voldemort was the un-namable villain in the Harry Potter series; Clarice Starling referred to doctors "not having a name for what [Hannibal Lecter] is", making him even more frightening to movie watchers.   The nameless villain, or source of power, enhances its ability to frighten us, based on the principle that things we can't identify elude our knowledge, thus causing us to be more wary of their potential danger. 

Even the depths of space and the ocean are largely feared because we haven't discovered their secrets yet.  Many fear what horrors lay beyond in these natural realms before our brave explorers discover them and realize that they are far more benign than we'd imagined.  Our imagination plays tricks on us, exaggerating the mysteries of unknown realms by substituting beasts where there aren't any.  Mythologies the world over try to explain natural phenomena by using supernatural beasts to illustrate their mysterious sources.  The Kraken, dragons, Hell-fire, kings of the dead- all are constructs in the collective mythology that reinforces our fears and keep us from exploring the great beyond. 

The human mind struggles against these conservative forces, keeping us grounded to what we're more familiar with.  With a little courage, we can break through barriers, expand our knowledge, and not allow fear to dictate our lives.  There are things to genuinely be afraid of, but you should never be afraid of something without fully understanding what it is and how it functions.  The failure to understand its meaning will keep you hidden in a shell, drifting in an ocean of ignorance, not being able to swim for the sake of your safety. 

Price Gouging During Natural Disasters

    Whenever there's a major hurricane, I always hear about gas stations and other suppliers jacking up their prices to meet the demand.  On NPR, I even heard an economist justifying this, saying that if they don't raise prices then hoarders will take more of their product and sell it at higher ones.  Those who come first are disproportionately allowed more of the emergency supply because they will buy more of it to place in stock for themselves.  A good point is made here, but in the wake of a natural disaster, businesses should be treated as monopolies because they are the only available ones.  Treating them as monopolies would ideally prevent price gouging.  This technicality would solve the problem of retailers taking advantage of scared people who only want to survive.  Anyone who buys from them only to sell at a higher price should also be guilty of it.

Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis

    Time's Arrow is a total mindfuck. It felt like a gimmick at first. A story told in reverse, from the perspective of someone's conscience trapped inside the head of a man living his life backwards. A trick to gather interest rather than substance, right? Wrong. As I kept reading, I got the sense that there was something more to this reverse time business. Eerily, I began to realize that actions seen in reverse that are considered bad by us would be perceived as "good" by them. And vice versa for good actions looking like bad ones. The narrator has no idea that Auschwitz was a diabolical operation. Instead, he sees it as the very opposite, of "angels being brought down from heaven"; the Jews, God's chosen people, liberated from death by the gas chambers. I'm not sure I'll recover from this existential crisis!