oh lord, baby, I don't know.

yesterday was my uncle's wife's birthday-- married last summer, they met in a NASCAR chat room, I was their wedding photographer-- and so I tore through Knoxville looking for a miniature novelty clock to add to her collection. I ended up at Appalachian Antiques on Campbell Station Road where the owner, Sandra, told me about a cat she'd been taking care of: she'd found him a few days earlier, mewing in her parking lot, all the fur burnt off his tail, firecracker in his rectum. he'd shifted around with his insides all messed up for a day and a half and then died; Sandra doesn't know whose cat he was.

so what're you gonna do? anger is pointless, indifference is wrong. grief will make you crazy because you daily walk around on a planet which is halfways populated by uneducated malnourished bored thirteen-year-olds who are bad because they were born that way or because someone was bad to them and messed them up or because they don't understand, who will put a firecracker inside a cat.

I think that I can undo every bad thing that's ever happened to me or to anyone. obviously, this is untrue. But I want to. Ever since I was little I wanted to. I always assumed, growing up, wild and out of my mind with half-formed holy ambitions, that I would be handed the tools and specific instructions for my love & good works; but that is also untrue.

*

conflicted:

At the height of the Aztec Empire, there was a mass sacrifice to the sun god Huitzilpochtli; extra executioner-priests worked in shifts for several days to sacrifice the massive load of captives standing side-by-side, in two rows stretching back four miles from the temple. A little while later, Cortes arrived, was repulsed by the idea of human sacrifice, and vowed to build a Christian cathedral in the place of every bloody temple. And you know what? Good. good, Europeans came in and killed the natives, destroyed their way of life. good.

Then a few weeks ago, I watched a documentary, the Discovery Channel talking to post-Saddam Iraqi civilians. they went up to a man in a cafe and asked him what he thought of Saddam, and his whole body shook, and he said, "I want, I want to kill him with my hands." And talk like that used to only strike me as war-mongering and progaganda, but now I have to wonder. What if the War really isn't a smokescreen for the Blood For Oil junta, like my father and almost everyone I know says, but an actual creature of piety? a lumbering oaf with good intentions. Is that possible? That hundreds of years from now, it'll just be one more giant of friction that moved the world along?

Incidentally, America, your PR is terrible. You look like you're made all out of rich people and entertainment junkies, and now all your mystics are against you. And, okay, I wish you would pay for my education and my dental care, but I just find it unlikely that you're the bloated despot people say you are. Every time I look at you, you seem startled by your own momentum-- backpedaling but too ashamed to admit you didn't mean to be where you are.

*

Also at Appalachian Antiques, a man came up to me as I was checking out (I didn't find any good clocks, but I did find some charming painted clay marbles from the 1870's) and asked where I went to church. I replied that I am not a church-goer. He asked me if I'd been told about how Jesus's love and I told him I had.

He said that now is the time to ask Jesus for forgiveness because of what's going on in Iraq, that the endtimes are upon us, and that any day now Jesus is going to come back and deliver us from:

"the demon cat, John Kerry."

which I think would make just a really fantastic campaign slogan. and instead of a campaign bus, Kerry could tour in a racecar! with lightning stripes on the side!!

John Kerry! DEMON CAT! zoom!

*

so this restless desperation to do something: something, I don't know, in the world, with my heart, to make up for casual evil and one of a million anonymous dead cats. But I feel haunted by ambiguity and the vast potential for misinformation, and that makes me pretty useless. So what're you gonna do? For now, romantic comedies, musicals, apology, good love and protein bars.

alestar
***
"daniel, my brother, you are older than me."
~ bernie taupin, "daniel"