Then the Lord answered me, “Write the vision. Make it clear on tablets so that anyone can read it quickly.”  (Book of Habakkuk 2:2)

Mission Statement, National Association of Christian Ministers, found one morning while I’m researching online ordination options

I had a dream about you last night. It was the second one this week. In the first one, you jumped off the roof of a church in my hometown. It was a church where two friends of mine had been married years ago and I hadn’t attended their wedding because of a snowstorm. It was a short fall and you seemed fine upon landing, but when I called 911 I accidentally said to them that we were “in the parking lot of Waters Funeral Home,” which is not where we were. And then last night I dreamed a different dream of you. We were at a fancy function and you were dressed in a tuxedo and all the girls were dressed in colorful ball gowns and I was the photographer at the event. Your two lady companions, one in a blue dress and one in green, each wished me good night and I wished them each a cheery goodnight, and you said nothing, even though there was a space where you might have said good night too, and in return I said nothing to you. I woke up still in the dream and was in my room sobbing and sobbing and trying to find a contact in my phone to sob to, when I looked toward the wall that I share with my neighbor and I could see light coming from under the wall, as if the wall were a door. I could hear the neighbor in there crying and saying ‘she.’ Then I knew he too had just had a lady refuse to wish him good night, because I recognized the pain in the sound of his crying. Then I felt a little more calm. Then I woke up for real. At first, it was more distressing to me when you refused to say good night than when you had jumped off the roof. But at the end, I found that there was a light under the walls of my cell, and the pain of rejection would be survivable after all. Upon waking I realized how much better this dream was than the other.

I don’t know how to tell you this. You have to find a food source that is close to your house. That is the most important thing, not what is served or how much does it cost. The important thing is that you get to it each day so that what you have bought does not spoil or crumble or attract pests. Whether you go to a soup kitchen, diner, grocery store, or garden, you must get to it in the ordinary course of your movements or else it is not a good source for you. But you do not know everyone’s situation and we must each do whatever works for us. Yes of course. Why have you come to a blog to see where to go for food? Haven’t you a map? A phone? Here we are on a rainy Sunday. When I came to this city, I was only twenty-eight years old. That is a fully-grown adult, and yet. I had no idea anything was wrong. I knew I cried a lot and didn’t have friends, but I mean. The problem with the blog is it keeps not making sense. Awfully convenient — if the author is a liar — isn’t it? I like authoritarianism, because they tell you what to do instead of manipulating you into it like democracy does. If you’re going to control me, do it yourself, don’t force me to spend my own energy controlling myself for you. Say: Stay in your house. Don’t say: Safer at home. Say: Get married. Don’t say: You’re nobody ’til somebody loves you. Say: Hey, I got a little job for ya. Don’t say: Be all you can be. Just tell me what to do, it’s not like I care. Then I realize, who am I talking to?

Sometimes there is some of this. Be savvy, find a deli to live over, and stay out of where it doesn’t want you. If lost, if broken, get back into the Christmas episode. If you see something, say I told you so. Quiero verme en el espejo pero no puedo. It’s hard to imagine looking at a word and not even knowing what it means, but in almost every language, that is what happens to me. It’s sort of harder work pulling the bigger numbers of the backlog, but everyone likes the show already and you haven’t seen it yet. What happens to him? Just a little bit. It’s exciting about the little pages. I guess. It feels so incredibly wrong to say this. My cat studied for fourteen years to be a fourteen-year-old cat, she’s really good at it. She has never started over, she was on the first track the right time. When the anger is done, you see how old you are, you go from there. You turned out to be a forty-three-year-old. What does one do? That is where age-appropriate considerations come in, it’s not something you would be familiar with unless it had happened. It’s funny how the exact same gates are there with the exact same latches. What kind of poetry do you write? Just abstract and stuff like that, please don’t worry, I’m not asking. I don’t have a favorite, but it’s me, not you. I don’t suit up without the proper haircut, anyone so very wrong could see that. The sun is what goes first and then you follow. Games are good but sometimes there is something more to do. Evade each angry plane diagonally sounds like an acronym for something, but it’s rude to decode things. A small dozen fell during the evening. I don’t know if everyone was on the same page. Blue luxe lunch tickets were tucked in pencil cases. It’s only a small amount of house, there won’t be many burglars. Roxie cooks burgers. Tina sells posters. We’re supposed to believe only some people are in charge and not all of us. If he is in charge, I am told to defy him. Awfully convenient. The thing about religion that makes it work is you have to tell it to yourself, not others. It is for practice, for starters. The sets are locked. The real film is taken from outside the gates. It comes from hours and hours on end of hearing a series of words and stems. It’s a syntax like amino acids, you can fill it in without understanding. It’s an equation that balances with or without apples. Like DNA. Like a dozen eggs for cooking, throwing, counting. We are all a little more hearty now with our youth fountain. Buy happiness, they said, it’s less materialistic. When you get down to the bottom of it, you can see the object. That plane up in the sky made it night again even though it’s almost six a.m. The sound of it tore through here like tractor trailer brakes on a distant highway. The city bus brakes make a little vox in the middle of the street. Does it have to come out from under the night? Do I have to know exactly where we are in space? Nobody believes a word you say, nobody blames you for anything, nobody takes you seriously. And then there is the fact that I kept telling them everything and my life kept going down and down and then one day, and that day never came and that’s the way it stayed. You can even cross the waves. Reality under a magnifying glass is blazing hot but once and again and again is this not it? Do you not remember the desperate and how to go about? There was time instead of pens you had lit cigarette. Honey? What are you doing? Was it ever said? Who was left to answer to besides the questioner and me and you? The easier the answer, the less was written. Don’t you think someone would ask? When you are afraid, you look like a scary thing. Constantly I’m worrying whether I should be eating or writing or making money or calling someone. Have I forgotten? Am I still up? Is it past time? Women with clean houses, I am one. As long as there are trash humans, I will be among. This looks like a person’s house. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Good enough. We agree whatever you want is what you should be in service of. Like your love, like your love, like your love. It is so easy to go out and be back and by midnight be done, but imagine having to explain everything to someone. Where two or more are gathered, you are wrong. It looks bad, she said, but you would know. Where is the shelf where we keep everything — where we keep everything that we can’t keep down low. You have to hear the words that come to you and process them and move on. That is all. It’s a game worth a million points, they told me to tell you. They said there would be an ear on the side of your house. The number of years between magnetic and nuanced is negligible in real life but not on Earth. I’m sorry, dear, we needed you here so long.

Sorry about that. That’s what he said. Ba dum ching. No but I was going to say something. It isn’t important though. I’ve been trying to train myself to be ready to listen to you. If you have said anything before, I have not heard you. I’ve tried some different religions to see if they can help me. Ultimately I come back to Christianity. I am more or less unwilling to follow any of them to the letter, and if I’m going to bastardize something it should be something that belongs to me. I was raised in the midst of Christian churches in West Virginia, and not only churches but on TV and on the money and in every apple tree. And so, with no other religion seeming superior, all being approximately the same to me, I become a Christian woman. I care what you are, but I will state arrogantly that I do not mind whatever you are. I hope that you likewise don’t mind me. You are my true belief. No man is my enemy. Nor any dog, or bird, or lady. What does she mean? Please don’t worry. My novels are named The Somewhat Welcome News, Let’s Say I’m You, and There’s No Crying In Whatever This Is. I have not written them. My poetry collections are called Jesus Is Lord Over Summersville, W.Va. and Circle The Animals. I have written the poems but I have not collected them. They have been edited, one by one. (Shocking, I know. “She was married to a baron. Oh-oh-oh, good for her-er-er.” “There is some evidence that she did edit her work.” Yes, we have brains, not that different from yours.) I started my writing career in community radio, so I’m always thinking about the audience. This person is driving in their car, or sitting in their armchair beside the radio, or working in the barn, and whatever I’m about to say is coming out of nowhere. It needs to make sense almost instantaneously and be pleasing to them, because they don’t have to listen. They are floating away. I can only keep them by saying something of value. You can tell from the minutiae in the animated jazz ambience videos what people really care about. Look at the level of detail in the rough blacktop edge along the sidewalk in front of the coffee stand, at the bottom of your screen. Look at the hard shadow the bucket of straws casts on the side of the trailer and the soft shadows cast by the leaves in the breeze. Look at the fine print on the sign on the parking meter.  Look at the winsome smile on the barista as he polishes the same cup with the same cloth lovingly forever, yes, but look also at the sunlight falling on his elbow, look at the wrinkle under the arm of his gray t-shirt under his burgundy apron.

To walk
By the road
Is to go
On a show. Everyone 
Wants to know
Why.

They know that as a human, you will crave the development of human potential. They won’t be able to dissuade you from wanting it. It’s an innate drive, the bedrock of the pyramid of your needs. So they make a show about it. There are extraordinary individuals who develop human potential right in front of us. They’re called celebrities. Representation matters because each one of us needs to see our own potential reflected back on the stage or screen or in the boardroom or at the podium, or else we will get restless and want to become something ourselves. Because celebrities fulfill a bedrock need for you, they are essential. So essential that they can afford no time off and no parts of themselves that are off-limits. It is widely and vehemently understood by the eldest and the toddler alike: Celebrities have no right to privacy. Because so many folks would perish without access, celebrities gave up privacy when they became everything to us. Otherwise we can’t keep everyone fed. This is a matter of ethics. Given that what they do matters so much more than anything else, we must hold them to a higher standard. Thus, we must each become a higher stan. We must stan the celebrities who will take human potential in the directions we would collectively like to watch it (from our seats) go. Human potential cannot be left to the whims of individual celebrities, artists, and other assorted assholes who think they’re better than us. As our birthright, human potential is something we all have a right and a need to control. Our right and our need are sides of the same token. Hold it in your hand, even if you’re scared. When it’s time to vote, drop it in. It’s your time to shine. We’re all rooting for you, safer at home.

~published on Facebook and Patreon dot com slash Campfire30, Valentine’s Day 2021

Something’s up. The starlings are having a bread crust party outside my window, screaming and hopping and fighting between bites. I wonder if we could talk, and if so, about what. It’s been four years and a day, so I call you up and say “Hey, I didn’t grow up in a normal culture like what you see on TV, but did I see you on 4th at Something’th near the Something House? I thought I did. It was October 3rd.” I used to cry at family gatherings. Not my family’s, other people’s, mostly those of significant others. They would bring me in for Christmas, nobody likes to see a girl out in the snow. And then, in front of my eyes, the lights on their trees would blur. So I just thought. But maybe it wasn’t you. I saw a video of a lion cub on a tv show set trying to snatch a human toddler out of its mother’s arms while the animal’s trainer calmly said “no” and untangled the youngster from the lion’s grip. The baby was unabashedly terrified but all of the adults stayed calm for the cameras, apart from a momentary scream from the mother which was quickly stifled and replaced by an awkward smile as the trainer regained control of the scene. Watching the video I notice that before the attack, the baby had started to scream. The baby was aware that a predator was right there. The trainer had come to show the tv audience how well the lion was trained and how nice the lion is. The tv crew was there to make a show. The studio audience was there to be entertained. The lion was there to be a lion. I’m not sure why the baby’s mother and the baby were there, and the baby didn’t know either. Let me play this through again. All of the adults were delighted by seeing a trained baby lion on a leash. The human baby was the only person on the scene who was aware that a predator was among them. It responded by crying to alert the adults that it needed to be rescued. No one moved to rescue it and in a moment the lucky lion had the smallest member of the herd caught in its inexperienced paws. After a bit of commotion the baby cat had lost its prey and the baby human had clutched its red lollipop in its little fist throughout the ordeal and was clutching it tightly still and wailing as the animal trainer tried to comfort the infant and mother while remaining cheerful for the audience. There was a lion trainer, a mother, a baby, a tv host, a co-host, a camera crew, and a studio audience. The infant was the only person who knew a lion was there. Something’s up. All those hours of promise of life in the future told in the form of messages in raindrops on tops of cars and headlights shining through raindrops hanging on window screens. All those cold nights when the frost on the grass foretold steam from the subways. All that neon on TV. It used to be event city and you would sit around on a folding chair on the aisle to get out easy or by the wall so no one else would have to contend with you. All those event nights of standing around outside. All those evenings arriving on time and leaving immediately after, no wonder. Look at this cock-eyebrowed sass boss, she can get it done just like any counterpart, look it up. Look at this plucky-eyed wildman, he is on a whim unstoppable, an unstuffed shirt, a sincere twinkle. We have been carving out this blog since mid-spring and out of it we have gotten only one small cave that does not even have a sea in it. Something is up. So this is going to be the last thing I’m telling you that doesn’t make sense. That’s all you get.

WE ARE ADVOCATES OF THE GOOD LIFE! We want to be competent, to be proficient, to be cooperative, to love our fellow man, to appreciate, to be humble, to be honest, to be moral, to live positively, to be what we profess.

Universal Life Church, Modesto California (a separate ministry from ULC Monastery, may God bless them both)