Brake Failure

For as long as she could remember,

     she knew.

She just knew.

It wasn't a decision, but rather a realization formed.

"It must be. It must be at all costs. I will be lauded. I will not be like the others." Over time, the inner voice pounded louder into a hardened certainty.

This conviction was never spoken, never revealed - except in deed alone. If questioned of her motives, she'd not reply. Her business was her own.

With an assassin's silence, her pursuit relentless and clear-eyed, this one master she served above all, a master she called God, to deceive both heaven and hell in assumed cleverness.

She lived above the world, in a cloud blessed by her irrefutable estimation, the only possible crime: her feet to touch the ground; apart from the masses was she, a more deserving being, destined to escape the dire traps of the average soul.

Little by little she accumulated success, building a monument to her life to be hailed and glorified in the name of God; they'd come worshiping at her temple, praising her, admiring her achievements, lauding a lifestyle reserved for the special and privileged few.

But this morning, she awoke with a tinny taste in her mouth. A switch had flipped. A worm had turned. She'd reached the end of a road.

The usually intoxicating smell of her fine Italian leather revolted her; the window light seemed foreign; voices - in her head, on TV, in the world around her - mumbled into an incomprehensible background cacophony.

She sought to escape the million dollar confines of her condo in her luxury auto. "What's happening to me? My pleasures have turned to torments! What can I live for? Everyone will find out the fraud I am, that my life is misery, and I will be outcast as a failure to our worldly bribe."

Thirty plus years in the making, she'd reached the holy grail of the con of cons, convincing herself that outward success meant inward success and none would be the wiser of the betrayal of her dreams - that which actually should be "at all costs" - and her vile single-minded pursuit of worldly acclaim.

"Why now??" But it didn't matter why, just how she could go forward on a diet she cannot stomach. She had her marriage thing, her dollar thing, her daughter thing, and her life safely in the clouds. If that's not enough then what's left under the sun? Winding her way up the mountain road she read doom in the eyes of each oncoming driver.

"Nothing I can see."

She pulled over to an empty lot, facing the wide vista of a high mountain scene.

"I'm the clever one! I fooled the world into thinking I'm something when I'm nothing! Haha! How to keep the lie alive!"

In her angry retreat from life she'd rowed herself out to sea only to open her eyes to find landless horizons in all directions.

Had she been insane the entirety of her life?

The constant inner chant, "Obtain more accoutrements of success!", her religion to save her from oblivion had put her in oblivion; a pervert she be, the beast she hated as a dreaming child.

Her solitary sojourn had reached its requiem. The blind spots in strangers - the currency of her life - bankrupted her hope as her true hopes were declared the enemy to be denied and life a perpetual hunt for a place to hide.

The clean light of the afternoon sun glanced off her windshield, a flying ant landed on her hood to seize the day; she was victimized. "An ant with fucking wings! Why would God make that horrible thing? Just to terrorize us! Is life not sacred to You? Get Your priorities straight! What is God but a keeper of denial?"

Then, with a blink she blanked. Not a damn thing she'd done meant a damn thing; imprisoned the remainder of her days to slowly dissipate; God laughing louder in bottomless victory as torment increases from the poisoned well of her pride; her lines of communication cut in bouts of vacuous vanity; the Word remaining imagined, never faced. She'd not been there for herself.

"My lie is over!" she confessed to the world. "Who can want me now?"

CODA: The police officer remarked on the lack of skid marks where the car ran off the mountain road to its fiery demise. "It's either brake failure or suicide." Her family was indignant. "It most certainly was not suicide! She had everything to live for. For her to even think of killing herself is absurd!" The officer looked at the faces of the adamant family members and complied with the desperate final cover-up. Then they too continued in the abyss of the dutifully demented as the world continues its descent.

Hello, Frog

"If you cling to your life, you will lose it, but if you let your life go, you will save it."

Like a frog being boiled, we're being twisted and molted like a wax candle left too close to heat, a slow-motion horror show that overtakes the heart and mind until nothing is left and unreality is accepted as reality and the end has come.

Conventional conservative wisdom is that Jesus is a liar, is too ignorant of the ways of the world (after having been crucified by them), and just basically is too stupid to live. We speak of our strategies and clever tactics and means and ways of fooling our Maker into having our cake and eat it too.

But we keep melting regardless of the well-reasoned arguments bought and sold.

As girls dance in uninhibited joy on TikTok we watch daily mass murder, children buried alive, food and water cut off from thousands upon thousands, and we think to ourselves: "What a wonderful world."

This boiling has been going on for a very long time, of course. Yesterday's unthinkable hell is today's lived insanity.

But let's not kid ourselves, as the heat turns up, so does the crazy.

Our children feel it most (which is why we view them as a threat to be controlled as we know what we're doing to them). One by one, lives are breaking down all around us, drowning in sorrow and shame and despair with no one to help. From space, the collective scream grows louder every passing moment. But who is to hear?

We make our plans and bless our future but only Nature's plans are to be realized despite our meaningless insistence to the contrary. We live in a drying desert but instead moving to where the water is we vote to not need water. And with God as my witness, every last man, woman and child on this earth will pay.

Long story short, I'm going bananas, losing my mind with the swirling madness. A new consciousness is coming, one no one will be able to deny - and then we'll find out what we've been fighting against throughout history is what we wanted all along.

The Political Man

Top Hat Joe preened his way down the boulevard in the pseudo-passionate pontificating way to which he had become accustomed. Beside him was Eddie, who knew no better but was certainly grateful Joe did.

"Eddie, my good friend, I'm telling you there's much of the world you need to learn. Having had the honor to serve in a parliamentary body myself, I can tell you things are never as a simple as they seem! Compromises must be made, deals struck, alliances made. It's the political man's job to save the world from itself."

"Is that so, Joe?"

"Indeed it is! In order to do good deeds for the masses I've had to make deals with the devil! You see, if you one side wants to kill all the Jews, and the other side none of the them then one simply splits it down the middle and kills half the Jews. If both sides are unhappy one knows one has made a fair deal!"

"Is that so, Joe?"

"Oh, Eddie, I could go on for hours listing the subtleties and intricacies of we godlike creatures in the political realm. It is simply thrilling!"

"Hey, Joe, look down the street. Ain't that your wife being attacked there by that man?"

Sure enough, a well-suited man was tearing off the clothes of Joe's spouse.

"Say there, my good man. It's too early for me to resort to violence as that would involve second-guessing your possible motives since perhaps you plan to stop at any moment as far as I know but I must say I certainly protest your current course of action in the strongest possible terms!"

The man continued attacking unabated, Joe's wife nearly stripped. Eddie urged his companion to act.

"Joe, do somethin'! She just about got nothin' left on her!"

Joe whipped out his ever-present notebook on which he often scribed his genius thoughts that need be saved for time immemorial. "I am, Edward, I am. I am composing the most stinging of editorials on this man's inexcusable and shocking behavior. I have friends, I tell you! Friends in high places who will have this published post haste!"

Joe's wife was now on the ground, stripped and positioned for final assault from her attacker.

Eddie urged once more: "Joe, do something!"

"I'm getting feedback now! Yes! Yes! Everyone concurs with my position most favorably! You hear that, sir? I do not wish to anger you but you must know you stand isolated in your stance by the wider community. To wit, I've been informed you are a shop owner of which no one will patronize until you cease this activity! You may wish to reconsider your behavior, I say!"

Joe's wife screamed, "Someone, please help!"

"Joe, I got my gun right here. I can just shoot the son-of-a-bitch."

"Eddie, my good man! You know full well that firearm is not licensed. Its use would be completely lawless and against the rules!"

"Rules? There's no rules in a street fight! It's kill or be killed."

"Rules and regulations are what give us a future. We must respect the law, I have signed no formal treaty with her. One must consider the geo-political implications, you senseless fool! Do you want to get us all killed?"

"Dammit, Joe, if he's dead no one need worry about that, do they?"

"I'm bleeding!" cried out Joe's wife.

"Joe, she may die!" Eddie exclaimed. "Can't you see nothin'??"

"Sir! Sir! I must warn you I plan to most vigorously prosecute you after you're done!"

Joe began texting furiously within his political circle, debating various strategies to alleviate the situation. Then, slowly and cautiously, he picked up a large stick off the ground and slipped it into his wife's hand. "Fight back, honey! Fight back. You can slow the rape and very likely delay the use of his knife!"

Joe looked back at Eddie expecting to see an approving look of Joe's cleverness but Eddie only shook his head in disdain.

"And here all this time I thought you knew somethin'! Turns out you ain't nothin' but a moron, without the sense God gave you! Now tell me somethin', Joe. Just what you gonna do if she dies now 'cause she already done been raped. Just what you gonna say then!!"

Joe first straightened his top hat so as not to appear unelectable, then resigned himself to say the speech to which he'd already rehearsed:

"Eh, she's Ukrainian."

The Frightened Child

"Kill first - find a reason later."

He cannot help himself, hounds of shame forever nipping his heels, driving him onward; doubling down on doubling down till death do him part

"My life is lost. There's no going back after what I've done." What a fool believes when he fails to believe

His tears ricochet as bullets; the more he cries the more they die: their screams his screams

Death's mirror beckons his nightly soul; razor lies filet hope's hope, blown ramparts of torment rain upon the unsuspecting

He promises himself impossible endings dreamed but not lived; the never-ending nightmare of forsworn truth

"Love me or kill me!", the credo of war, depths of despair crater the land

Word portrait of the Son burns in his heart; a never-to-be-revealed state secret known to all

"A man' worth is judged by his ability to lie to himself."

Every hell cries out for help. Masturbatory missiles launching lonely clusters of fear into the sky, terror's child pleads to be heard

"Please don't leave me alone. Please don't leave. Please..."

Bennie And The Thefts

So Bennie the Thief dropped by yesterday afternoon. Apparently he had something pretty heavy on his mind so he came over to my indoor-plumbed hole-in-the-wall to not talk about it. That's probably why he picked me, I usually fail to pry.

I like it whenever I run into Bennie as I'm intrigued by his outlaw lifestyle even though I confided to him I cannot do the time so I cannot do the crime. Honored to be his safe harbor, I tried bringing up various innocuous topics for discussion but he just kept grousing, "Fuck [fill in the blank]" of whatever I brought up. Thusly, the literary 'heavy silence' one reads about descended upon us until I started to suffocate and finally had to come up for air.

"So, Bennie, just exactly when did you inform the guidance counselor your career path was Thief?"

That got his attention. Slowly he turns his scruffy black-haired ethnic face to me (He looks Middle-Eastern but I don't know what the fuck he is. Never asked.) and gives me a half-cocked look of, "You fuckin' with me?"

But I eyeball him right back with a smirky smirk that says, "Damn straight, I am!" Sometimes it pays to have a reputation for being sarcastic.

Then he actually proceeded to answer the question.

"See, it's like this..." He paused as if reconsidering the wisdom of revelation. Then, keeping his eyes peered down his beer bottle, replied: "I guess it's when I realized every good moment I'd had in life I had to steal."

Fuck me.

Now I was the one drowning in miserable silence as the truth of what Bennie said soaked into my own shit-infested existence. What is mine that is good? I'm just marking time in poverty's prison until I'm off this planet. A shared joke on a janitorial break, dreaming while driving to my soul-sapping night job while the rest of the world parties, swiping a Reeses from the office snack bar without paying; any good times for me are stolen too...

I looked up at Bennie. He didn't seem so down now and had pulled his keen, intelligent eyes out of the pit of the bottle. I sensed his spirits had lifted. Probably because he'd brought me so horribly down. The fucker.

I couldn't let it lie, of course. "Well, you know what the song says: 'There must be some way out of here said the joker to the thief.'"

"Ha! You always come up with some sort of shit to say, Harry. Just like that supervisor guy you pissed off."

Bennie looks down on my working-poor jobs as I think he's secretly recruiting me. He's referring to the time I muttered under my breath, "That brain transplant didn't stick, did it?" after one boneheaded decision too many by the brown-nose in charge. A mutual acquaintance told Bennie about it and made me out to be a hero but really I took the whole incident as one more sign my life is on the wrong track.

"That idiot redneck motherfucker. Sometimes you just got to cut loose and hope there's a better way."

Bennie stared into the unspoken abyss before him. "I'd sure like to think there's a way out of this."

"I'd like to think there's a way out too."

Neither one of us did.