Icon, can you?

The first time I saw God, I was digesting a bellyful of poison and processing a headful of one of the stronger psychoactive biological byproducts known to the sapiens crew. Staring at the placid surface of the pond, I grokked and grokked, alternately smiling and sobbing; feeling at once completely refreshed and utterly destroyed.

When the face-to-face confrontation became too much, I trailed my fingers through the water to disrupt the image. Narcissus' failure was not in his gaze, but rather in his inability to shake things up every now and then. We become enchanted with and enamored of our own iconized fictions, forgetting that they're no more than deep ruts of habit—and no more valuable than a scent whose strength fades almost as soon as it becomes apparent.

As the ripples settled down and my reflection rematerialized, I recognized that I finally understood everything. The pattern was clear. Through the course of history, the spiritual looking-glass had been clouded over by a multitude of cheap products and obscured by the patina of centuries of filthy rags.

As I see it, the truth that the snake-oil prophets would obscure forever is simpler than anyone would believe. As I see it, the truth of the universe (which is infinitely complicated or shockingly simple, depending on the layer) rests briefly in each one of us. But through a mad web of manipulation and an artificially structured society, we've been led to believe that there are paragons to admire and pinnacles to aspire to.

This is wrong. This is the product of living in a "community" of 300 millions, a number that the human brain can't even really conceptualize outside of an abstract comparison to grains of sand or stars in the sky. Bound together by a vague sense of patriotism, we sift through the proverbial hourglass while bullies with billy clubs keep us from disturbing the peace as we worship the plebeian promise of the American Dream.

But the truth of the matter is, the patsies always outnumber the iconoclasts, which traditionally means the latter are killed as soon as feasible. Nowadays, however, such individuals are simply paved over by the bland idolatry of 1/300,000,000. Even God has been rubbed out by those who refer to it the most.

©2011 Paul D Blumer

Remembering 9/11

9/11/11
I'll never forget where I was on 9/11. Down to which seat at which lab table, I can point out where I was in advanced Chemistry, lighting steel wool on fire, startled by how well and how quickly it burned. There was an announcement:

Ladies and gentlemen, a plane has run into the World Trade Center in New York city.

A very serious fucking accident. How could that happen? Those buildings have been there so long. How could they let that happen?

The whole class was abuzz, and some people started worrying aloud about people they knew in The City. Some classes sat silent, some classes started discussions, some classes ran amok in disbelief.

And then the second plane hit.
Suddenly it was an attack.
Suddenly a chill ran through the blood of anyone paying enough general attention to understand what was going on. Classrooms emptied out as students and teachers filed into the auditorium to watch the news on big screen. Tom Clancy provided some commentary based on his experience imagining such scenarios. Certain students were picked out from the crowd to get on the phones with mom and dad.

The smoke pouring from the buildings warped perspective, a nightmarish billowing as if they were mere smokestacks. As if they weren't a roiling glimpse at the inferno underlying any industrial nation. As if they weren't spewing the souls of thousands at high velocity into the beautiful azure afternoon.

The talking heads were choked up, some fending off panic, everyone milling about in a daze. School buses rolled in, but no one wanted to leave the screens for fear of missing something crucial. People held each other who'd not spoken three words in two years. A brotherhood and a defiance set people in step with one another, and many kids vowed to join up, to defend against whatever may follow.

It was a horrific day, a glorious September day, an innocuous day turned upside down. For all the victims, and the victims families, and the firefighters who'd get fucked by the insurance companies, and the soldiers, and the Iraqis and Afghani people who had nothing to do with it, and for everyone watching the accelerated crumbling of the American Empire, it was a day that changed everything.