~ Nick ~

“Can I tell you a story?” she asks.

It’s her only introduction as she sits down beside me on the floor, arms clasped around her legs, chin resting on her knees. She looks at me, lost in thought, mulling over whether whatever she wants to say should be said or not.

“I don’t even know how to start, really.” She laughs and flashes me a shy glance. And then, from out of nowhere, comes: “Hey, do you ever think about what it’s going to be like when you die?”

The air feels heavier, and I notice that I’m having trouble breathing.

“You’re going to have to think about it at some point, right? I mean it’s not like it’s not going to happen.”

I will my lungs to inhale, but nothing happens. My heart beats faster, and all these questions flash through my mind: What makes me think it couldn’t happen right now? Am I ready for it? When it comes for me, will I be brave?

“You don’t really want to hear any of this do you? Want me to leave? I can leave. I’m sorry.” She starts to get up, and damn it, I have to keep it together.

“No!” I say quickly. “I can handle it.” And I’m breathing just fine. Everything is just fine.

“Okay,” she says slowly, raising an eyebrow. There’s a painful minute of silence before she begins to speak again. “Alright, here goes… You sure?” I nod my head. “Well, my grandmother had this idea about why we close peoples’ eyes when they die…”

I look around, and we’re in the land of the dead.

“…In fact, she didn’t believe that anyone really dies. She said we only call them dead because we don’t see any signs of life as we know it.” Silence again. She laughs to herself and turns to me. “I never even asked your name!”

“Nick,” I say, very conscious of this strange label I’m using to describe the person sitting beside her. “I’m Nick.”

What does that mean, exactly? Does she really know any more about me now that she has a name?

“Hi Nick, I’m Marianne!”

Somehow it does make a difference. My artificial smile turns into a genuine one, and for the first time since this party started, I don’t feel that anxious need to keep moving. “Nice to meet you, Marianne.”

“Likewise!” she says, smiling and drilling into me with her bright, shining eyes. I don’t want to do anything but explore the universe in those eyes, to become reflected in them. She notices and becomes self-conscious for a moment, losing her train of thought.

“So, you were talking about…”

“Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that the soul leaves the body at death. But why? What if there’s something still there? All this time, we’ve been worried about the end, but what if the end is just a fairy tale? Maybe there is no escape. Maybe our body becomes a prison.”

She pauses, taking a deep breath and listening intently to the music in the background. “I love this song.” Marianne and I listen until the the track morphs into a completely different track, the actual transition lost somewhere in the middle.

“That was a great switch!” I say. “Did you notice it?”

Marianne shakes her head. “I remember her explaining all of this to me, and I remember seeing my dad standing just off the entryway to the living room, listening to the whole thing. She didn’t see him and he didn’t notice me looking — and I never told either of them.”

I notice that our breathing has become synchronized. Did she fall into my rhythm or did I fall into hers?

“That moment’s like a snapshot, and it really bothers me sometimes. It was a turning point. Everything still seemed okay, but it was about to get really, really bad — and I sort of felt it. I think we all felt it. Even grandma. She started to get real hushed, like people naturally get when the lights go out and there’s a sudden darkness.”

The beat crashes back into our reality for a time, and I allow myself to drift into it while my new friend drifts inside her past. “Sorry,” she says. “That was just a bit intense. I mean, whoah! I was there again, man. Right there.” She takes a deep breath, and then she continues. “I remember this awful, ugly look on his face…”

“Did he say anything about it?”

“No, he kept it to himself. But I could tell that he was brooding about it. I think he hated my grandma for saying what she said.”

Marianne stares off again into the scene in front of her face. The living room is packed with people, talking over the music playing in the background, the source of it bouncing back and forth between a couple of turntables, manifesting in the air in front of a pair of 800 Watt JBL speakers.

“She died a week later.”

“I’m sorry to…”

“I think he killed her.”

Things are suddenly very tense. It’s like the entire world goes fuzzy and then connects again onto a completely new frequency. I’m not so sure I like this one. “What makes you think that?” I say.

“Sometimes someone just hates an idea so much.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think it all means?”

“I think she meant that as long as we identify ourselves with our body, we’re trapped there. The living close our eyes to make sure that we don’t have to see what goes on next – so we don’t have to see ourselves getting buried, getting filled with worms, decomposing – you know all that stuff that would just give you the shivers.”

I get the shivers as she says this. My mind races with thoughts of worms and other crawling, creeping things. “It’s more for the living than for the dead, I guess. It would still be horrible. But what can you do?”

What can you do?

I’m attacked by this splitting headache. I close my eyes, and all I can see are worms and dead things. Marianne’s asking what’s wrong and I’m saying nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong, but at the same time, something is horribly wrong. I want to be anywhere but here. I feel like, if I can’t get out of here right now, I’ll go insane.

Blink.

I’m in it. Instant bliss. Instant connection. Instant happiness. I blink and look on the world again with fresh, childlike eyes. There are lights. Clean, crisp, and hopeful. There are people dancing. The music flows through them and into me and back out, back through the people, and it’s one infinite cosmic cycle, passing the energy back and forth. Sort of a big feedback loop. And as it ping-pongs back and forth from person to person, the energy actually grows. It’s a big monster of energy now. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can stop us. Life. Love. Motion.

Can you feel that universal pulse? I mean, can you feel it? It’s right here, so close that you wonder if you put your ear in just the right direction, you’ll hear every secret exposed – all at once.

It suddenly occurs to me that I should tell Marianne about this, but when I turn, she isn’t there. And then I realize that it isn’t the same party. I met Marianne once, a month ago, and I haven’t seen her since.

How did that night end, anyway? I don’t even remember what she looked like besides beautiful. It’s like she just became this concept, this ghost. She became an ideal, floating through the air and through my mind, torturing me with thoughts of a dark and golden world, and goddamn it anyway, because I’m going to drive myself nuts if I keep thinking like this.

Bam! I snap my fingers to nobody in particular. That’s right. Her friends were leaving. She had to go. She said goodbye, kissed me, and then she smiled and ran off to catch up with them.

Everyone’s so goddamned cut off from everyone else and I have to admit, people like me – they don’t even know how to connect anymore when they do have a chance. It’s like a muscle that’s gone into atrophy – so complete that the nerves themselves are dead, and no matter how hard you try, you’re never going to get it working again.

But every so often, a bit of magic happens. The dead nerves fire up again. The impossible becomes possible. Everyone comes back to what it means to be human. They connect! In fact, after a while, you sort of expect that kind of magic. After all, it’s kind of what this place is all about.

Look at Mark! Not even dancing. Just drifting through the crowd like he’s on an evening stroll. There’s a monster grin on his face, and I can’t help but smile too.

“Mark! What’s up?”

“Constant motion. It’s all about constant motion. Try and stay in one place, and the motion will rip you apart. But if you go with it…” He loses his train of thought and just smiles.

Motion! Jesus, he’s right! It’s… It’s like the whole of reality is just constant motion. Every so often, the motion settles into something semi-predictable and we say that something exists.

Example: clouds exist, but they’re not actually those fluffy-white things in the sky. They’re millions and millions of water droplets, momentarily together, giving us fluffy white manifestations. Sometimes they look like a historical figure, sometimes like a continent. For a time, they exist. But that thing that exists… it’s all in our heads.

There’s no actual cloud. That’s just a name and form that our minds gave something that is, in reality, constantly changing. It’s always becoming something else while it destroys what it was before.

We don’t get attached to clouds. We can sit and watch them change from face to face, landform to landform, form to formless for hours on end. If only we could look at everything else that way…

Mark’s digging this thought pattern. It gives us both a small and precious hope that we’re understanding the way things truly are.

Happiness radiates into the future. It’s not hopeless. Life is still miraculous. It is still worth the struggle.

Celeste floats by, lost in her own movement. With every step, I see her touching effortless perfection. It’s just her and the music. It drifts through the open air and carries her away into sweet oblivion.

I see her wave to a man who’s been watching her from some shadowy corner. He gets up and walks towards her, and I smile because this has to be the quintessential Celeste. She fearlessly makes time for everyone.

I turn away and observe the room. It’s a psychedelic bliss. Costumes walk by, a hodgepodge of fantasy, pop culture, and pornography. I imagine this is the only place in the world where you can see a nurse and a milkmaid talking to Jesus himself. Even this site is eclipsed by the the giant watermelon dancing beside Batman and Robin. And then, just when you think you’ve seen it all, Batman and Robin lock lips and start going at each other like a couple of college wrestlers. I knew something was up with those two. Ever since that old series with Adam West in it…

“We’re gonna lose our minds one of these days, Nicky.”

It’s CJ, looking out on the scene with me. He’s probably right. Funny thing about people who are really, really crazy, though – most of them seem to be having a hell of a good time.

“Well,” he says in an almost fatherly tone, “It’s not like you can take it with you to the grave, I guess.”

~ Karl ~

Everyone has passwords – those things that get you past every single door and into his or her deepest inner sanctum. The question is: do you want to go there? Do you really? Do you know how you would handle real power?

Now, I’m sure almost anyone would start out with the lofty idea of holding himself to a very high moral standard, and to that, I can only say bravo! Good on ya. But life is very long, my dear friends, and we all bore so easily.

For all the time we spend talking about how we want to get to know our fellow human beings, we spend a hell of a lot of time trying to avoid just that. And there’s a reason we do this. It’s a protective mechanism. It keeps the species alive.

Because if you really knew – I mean, if you really, really knew – well then, either you would love us in the most selfless way, so selfless, in fact, that you would be an easy pick from the herd – or you would come to hate humanity so much that no treason you could commit against it would seem too high.

I whisper a password into this one girl’s ear, and she walks over to her friend — and that friend gets angry and runs up to a guy I’d been watching for a while and slaps him.

I snap a card to the front of the deck I’m holding, so fast I almost think I really did just make it appear there.

The guy runs across the room to this other guy who’d been a real shit to me earlier in the night and just starts wailing on him. One of the organizers goes up to them, yelling at them to take it outside, so they drag him out of the room.

I chuckle, flipping another card to the front of the deck, and wonder if he’ll ever make the connection.

~ Celeste ~

Everything is so beautiful. Sometimes I wonder how they put it all together in time. It must hurt to take everything down, to let this thing turn back into a boring old hall, where equally boring people hold their boring events.

It almost feels like my body isn’t real. It’s just moving with the beat, never tired, never clumsy. This is freedom.

This guy comes up to me, and I only see his eyes. They’re hypnotic, and like… I feel like I’m Eve back in the Garden of Eden and… he’s the snake, man. They’re snake eyes… wild!

“How’s it going?” I say.

“Good,” he says, and well, duh… who’s not having a good time tonight? He’s looking at me like he’s got some big secret that he wants to tell me and… I’m normally up for these things, but something makes me not want to hear it. The thing is, he just keeps looking at me and smiling and… fuck, he’s probably just trying to figure out which line to try on me…

“Okay, just spit it out. But I’m not above slapping you if you’re gonna be rude. Just remember that.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“Well, okay then,” I say, and this guy just has me locked into those eyes. I’m starting to get a bit creeped out. I blame the Internet for this. Suddenly all these social retards are reading equally retarded advice on how to pick up girls, and… well, guys, I hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t work. The thing that causes you to strike out with us is the same thing that makes you want to study the science of picking us up – you try too hard!

“I was wondering how you would taste.”

Jesus. Bold, but completely unoriginal. Please… “My vibrator has consistently proven better than any man’s tongue, thank you very much.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he says, still smiling.

“Well then, what the fuck do you mean? Listen, I’m sorry… I don’t mean to be a bitch, but this isn’t fun any more.”

“If you let me eat you, your soul will go to paradise.”

Freak. He’s trying to mess with me. There’s at least one of these dicks at every party — you know, trolling for the kids who can’t handle their acid.

“Okay,” I say, “Let me get this straight. You actually want to eat me. Like, knife and fork style? How good a cook are you? What spices would you use? Bake or roast? Look, I think you’re gonna have to try this shit on someone a little less experienced… I’m not falling for it, and just so you know… it’s kind of creepy.”

He looks frustrated. I’ve cracked him. Well sorry, asshole, but that’s what you get when you fuck with a pro. “It’s been fun,” I say, and I go back to my dancing.

I haven’t even found my groove yet, and he grabs my arm. “But… you’re the one,” he says, and I notice this twitch that his head does every minute or so. Okay… I won’t lie. I’m starting to get a bit scared right now. “It’s the only way,” he stammers, and he seems perplexed, like I’m supposed to be understanding this shit.

And then he’s all confident again. “Come with me,” he says, “This place… it’s too noisy… somewhere quiet. I’ll tell you… I know many secrets.”

Why am I afraid? I’m in a room full of people. But as I look around, none of them are really here. Just a moment ago Nick was looking right at me, and I almost thought he was going to interrupt, but no… he’s lost in his own world just like everyone else.

I close my eyes and try to regain some focus. I’m safe here. As long as I’m here, all he can do is try to fuck with my head. They were patting everyone down at the door. The only people who’d get a weapon in would be the drug dealers, who know the organizers, and who always manage to make sure there are plenty of pills inside for anyone interested. And this guy is no drug dealer. I know the look. So I’m safe. I really am. There’s nothing to worry about.

“Pray you never get this far,” he whispers in my ear, and I just keep trying to ignore him until he goes away.

~ Nick ~

My head is electric with thought. The whole room is electric. You can almost hear that hum of the power jumping from person to person along invisible super lines. We’re going to change the world. I’ve never been more certain about anything in my life. And when you’ve got that – you’re flying. You’re indestructible. Because that passion, that unshakeable faith – it makes you strong.

I can’t help but feel that absolutely anything is possible tonight. In fact, there’s so much possibility that I can’t decide on anything specific. I just want to float around and do nothing and feel a part of it all, a part of the infinite. Sometimes when I’m inside these moments, I wonder if I just closed my eyes and snapped my fingers, whether I would suddenly find myself exactly where I wanted to be, whether life from here on in would feel like I had been put under the most beautiful spell.

And sometimes, inside the same moments, I feel like dying. Not because I’m sad, but because of the fullness of my happiness. I feel so pure, so clean, so content, and so certain that life is beautiful. The part of me that knows these feelings will fade whispers to me how nice it would be to have this state of mind be the last thing I know as my consciousness disappears into the darkness from which it came. If only someone could put a gun to my head right now and pull the trigger…

“Hey, what’s Celeste doing there all by herself?” CJ says. I look back at Celeste, who’s still standing in the same spot, now on her own.

I follow CJ as he walks toward her. “Celeste! What’s up buttercup?” She rushes towards him.

“Holy shit, man!” she whispers fiercely. “Am I glad to see you!”

She doesn’t even see me, but that’s alright. I’m sort of hard to notice at times. Besides, you tend to focus in on very specific things here. There’s just too much information coming at you to do more than that. You can see entire galaxies turning in another person if you have the right kind of eyes.

~ Celeste ~

“Wow girl! Don’t know what I did to deserve that, but let’s say you and I find some place a bit quieter and you can tell me all about how glad you are to see me.”

I still don’t know why CJ’s always pulling that player shit with me. He knows I don’t take it seriously, right? I mean, if he is really playing the game, I’m sorry, but he’s doing an awful job of it – way over the top.

But sometimes I look at him and I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing. If that’s the case, then he’s the most brilliant person I know because he keeps you guessing, and just when you think you might be close to getting him in a box, he bursts straight out the other side.

“CJ,” I say, rolling my eyes and shaking my head, though I guess the grin gives it away that even my disapproval isn’t genuine.

“What are you giving me that look for, girl? What’s a guy supposed to think, you saying that to him and then getting all cold and shit?” For a small moment, it seems like he’s really stung, and I regret brushing him off like that, but then he’s back to the CJ we all know and love, with a set of lines that would win him the 2005 Cheese Award if there was such a thing: “Girl, you know you and I were meant to be. I read it in my horoscope today. Said true love would dance into my heart tonight, and there you were!”

Then there’s that cocky smile and I can’t help but smile too, and… I’m really thankful that he’s here right now because I was really scared and now I’m not. I feel safe again, and I try to tell him this in a way that won’t inflate his ego too much.

“What are you talking about, C?”

“That guy. He was really fucked up, man! You should have heard some of it.”

“What guy?”

So I tell him the story, and my mind flashes back to those eyes. Those eyes… I mean, I half expected a big forked tongue to shoot out from his mouth. It was like he was trying to swallow me with a stare…

“What the fuck? No way the cunt gets away with that shit.” CJ can’t stand still. He’s just shifting back and forth on his feet, talking himself up. From this angle, he even seems to be getting bigger. “Shit C, why didn’t you come find one of us?” He’s looking around for any even slightly evil looking face now. “Where is he? Tell me what he looks like and I’ll bust the fucker up. He won’t even be able to say his own name after we’re through.”

~ Nick ~

She has real power in her hands right now. Just point CJ in any direction and let him go nuclear. I’m horrified. At the same time, the bloodlust buried deep in every one of us comes right up into my throat. There’s a hint of anticipation, the hint of a primal grin. “I’ll pistol whip the cunt. Put him in traction…”

“CJ, that’s not right,” she says. He wouldn’t really do that, would he? I mean, no matter how messed up this guy was, it’s not like he did anything to hurt her. He just freaked her out. That’s all. Besides, all she seems to remember are the eyes. It’s like she didn’t see anything else.

Celeste turns to me. “Nick, do you remember what he looked like?”

~ Celeste ~

“No,” he says, and he looks sort of frustrated with himself. He was probably perving out or something. I remember seeing him look in my direction, and there was that glaze in his eyes. He tries to be so perfect and detached when he knows someone’s looking, but when you’re not looking, he’s probably checking out your ass.

I’ve caught him doing that a few times, not that he’d know. He seems to think he’s slyer than everyone else. Maybe I should just call him on it one of these days.

“So, he was just saying a bunch of weird shit?” he says, and you can see he’s doing everything he can to keep his gaze above the neck.

~ Nick ~

I try to put things into perspective. “Celeste, if anyone had really known, I’m sure they…”

“Nick,” she says, “It’s okay.”

“Motherfucker!” CJ says to himself. “Motherfucker! I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him. Where is he, C? Where the fuck is he? Right now! Fucking dead.” And CJ reaches into his pants. A gun? Does he really have a gun? Before I can see, Celeste puts her hand on his, telling him to calm down, that the guy’s long gone, not to get worked up about it. CJ totally shifts gears. He’s talking softly now. “Are you sure you’re alright? I’m sorry, C. I should have been there.” And she’s telling him it’s okay, and she’s smiling that sweet smile that she wears so well, and CJ’s just soaking it up.

“It’s alright, CJ,” she says. Then she laughs and you can almost see the good spirits re-enter her body. “Man, he was saying the weirdest shit, though. And all along, he seemed to think he was being terribly clever. Like… something about ‘shortbread for feet’… what the hell is that supposed to mean? Or was that someone else? I don’t know… I’ve run into a few people tonight who were really tripping hard. I wonder what he was on.”

CJ shakes his head. “Sounds like a perma-fry to me.”

“He seemed like he was having fun.”

“Right up until he realizes my feet aren’t made of shortbread.”

Celeste bursts out laughing and hugs CJ. “My hero,” she says, pushing the drama as she looks at me. CJ looks around nervously to see if anyone’s watching him.

As I watch them together, I start to feel a bit of blue creeping in, and I know it’s time to get beautifully lost. I say my goodbyes to CJ. He understands.

You have to keep moving at these things. Stay in any one place for too long, and your thoughts will collect around you like a swarm of mosquitoes.

I find myself sitting down in one of the other rooms, talking to some random raver. Mark’s taking a break too, starry eyes shifting from person to person.

There’s this one in particular, an angel in full angel uniform, complete with wings and glitter and strange makeup designs on her face. The only thing missing is the halo. Maybe she lost it somewhere. She’s smiling at me like there’s some private joke that she’s waiting for me to figure out.

“Do you know who this is?” she says mysteriously.

Everything suddenly registers. “Of course I do!” I say. “Why are you back so early?”

“It was time to come back,” she says with such certainty. Beautiful Annette! She just listens to the world, lets it guide her, and she glides along with this natural grace. Everything she touches turns to gold. Hell, even the bleached blond hair and the lip ring are growing on me. How is it that the world hasn’t figured out how to break her down yet? How did she survive all this time? How is she still so sure about everything?

“Well I’m glad you did! Mark. Hey Mark! Look who’s here.”

Mark comes over and gives Annette a big hug. “Long time no see, kid! How was B.C.?”

“My family sucks, man! I don’t know. They’re all settled and I guess they think I should just roll with what they’re doing. They can’t stand me being my own person. Yeah.” And she giggles. “It was good, you know? I missed them. But now I need to live my own life again, you know? And I missed you guys so much. So, yeah…” Again that shy, weary laughter.

“Well, it’s good to have you back!”

“Thanks,” she beams. Huge grin. “So, anyway,” she says, looking back at me, “I’ve got to go and say hello to a few more people. I’ll be back. We need to sit down and have a good long talk.”

“Sure thing,” I say, beaming back.

I see Karl and Sam in the corner. Predictably, they look like they’re planning something. And there’s that deck of cards in Karl’s hands. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without it. He’s always practicing his sleight of hand, which, as he’s told me before, is the only way you get good at it.

“Did you know she’s his sister?” Mark asks me, as if he’d been eavesdropping on my thoughts.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s… odd.”

“Isn’t it,” Mark says. He takes a quick glance from side to side and lights up his hash pipe, as if he’s some psychedelic version of Sherlock Holmes. I guess that would make me Watson.

“Nothing is as it seems,” Celeste says, suddenly standing beside us, with a raised eyebrow. She can only hold it for a few seconds before she breaks out in giggles. “What are you guys talking about anyway?”

“Never you mind, my dear. Top secret, you know. For your own good.”

Celeste’s eyes narrow. She scrunches up her face and sighs. “Men!”

“That’s right,” Mark shoots back, and he makes a few grunting noises to settle the argument once and for all before he changes the subject. “Hey, did you see Annette?”

“Yeah,” Celeste says, frowning momentarily. “I think I talked to her for about two or three minutes. You know, long enough for her to say how much she missed me and how glad she was to see me. And then, well… she had to make the rounds, I guess.”

“What’s got you so negative?” Mark asks.

“I don’t know,” she says, still so unsure about everything. “It’s been a really weird night.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No, not really,” she says, glancing briefly at me. “I think I just need another pill. And then I want to catch up on my dancing.”

“Good music tonight, isn’t it?”

“It’s amazing!”

I turn around, and there’s Karl. I wonder, for a moment, how long he’s been there — and if that quizzical look in his eyes is him knowing that I had been talking about him, wondering whether I’ll confess. I’m almost sure he knows what Mark and I were up to, as innocent as it felt at the time, but he doesn’t ask and I silently plead the fifth.

“Hey man! How’s it going? Uh…” I turn back to Celeste and Mark and then shrug. There’s no need for that. Celeste and Mark are already lost in conversation, completely forgetting there’s anyone else in the room.

Mark seems concerned for some reason. Best not to draw any conclusions, though, because everything I’m seeing right now is amplified. That momentary frown, that weary look people give for a fraction of a second and don’t even really notice – I’m catching all of that tonight. Bam! Freeze frame, like I’m a human camera, only passing developed freeze frames on to my brain. Every so often the freeze frame catches someone off guard. I force myself to throw the picture away.

“You always seem to have a lot on your mind,” Karl notes as we walk into our own exclusive world of conversation. All around me I hear a cacophony of noise. There are voices, there’s pounding music, but none of it is decipherable. Karl’s not even trying to raise his voice over it all, and still his words transmit with digital clarity. Everyone else might as well be speaking Ancient Aramaic. In fact, I wonder for a flash of a moment, maybe that is what they’re speaking.

No. That wouldn’t make any sense.

“Sorry, what did you say?” I ask a moment later.

“Never mind. I don’t want to interrupt the unlocking of the mysteries of the universe. How could I live with myself if I was responsible for holding back the world’s next messiah?”

“That was so ten minutes ago. I’ve moved onto contemplation of humanity and social dynamics.”

“Ah,” smiles Karl. “That’s always my favorite part. If I could skip the whole meaning of life phase and just stay in that mellow contemplative phase, I’d do it. Who wants to know that other shit anyway? I’d much rather know what makes a person do the things a person does that seem so strange, how much of what we call common sense is really just indoctrination, and god damn! What’s the best way to start up a conversation with that little princess?”

I turn to see Karl’s subject, dancing with abandon. Anonymous, mysterious, and spellbinding in her skintight everything. “Ah fuck. Give her a week and she’ll be a meth head. Impossible to deal with. Not worth it, the grief she’ll give, for those few days of honey. But damned if I don’t want to just pretend all that’s not going to happen.”

“How can you be so sure?” I ask.

“She’s a bright bulb, that’s all.”

“A bright bulb?”

“Yeah.” Karl pauses. “Look at her. Doesn’t she just seem to have this incredible luminosity about her? Doesn’t she seem to shine, to be more saturated with color than everyone else around her?”

“Okay,” I say, squinting. “I think I see what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, well, everyone else sees it too. And if one moth doesn’t go for that light, another one will. She’s going to keep attracting them. She can’t help it. Just that, and she might have a chance. Except there’s something else that makes her shine even brighter. Can you tell me what it is?”

I think for a while, starting to frown as I come closer and closer to what Karl’s suggesting. “Yeah, I think I so.”

“Tell me.”

“Innocence.”

“You got it. Innocence. Take that away and she could survive. Hell, she’d probably be in the mountain moving business. But she’s just a bright bulb. And it’s only a matter of time before she gets a little too much electricity going through her.”

“Shit,” I say, the compassion playing butterflies in my stomach.

“Yeah, it’s a bit of a bummer, at least for her and anyone who gets attached to her. As for the rest of us… we just find a new bulb. And there are plenty of those.”

“That doesn’t seem to bother you.”

“You’re going to go through a lot of anguish before your time here is done, Nick. It’s… it’s the way you have to look at things. Because that’s what happens, no matter how hard you might try to keep it from happening. And the sooner you learn to accept it, the more fun you’ll have.”

“Maybe you’re right…”

“What about the bright bulb you’ve been staring at?”

“What do you mean?” But I know. I know. And Karl knows that I know.

“She’s a dreamer,” he says, with a faint, pained smile. “She’s looking for meaning. Meaning in life. Meaningful relationships. Good people. People she can be herself around and people she can depend upon. She’s had a great life, but there’s that emptiness. Maybe they’re here. Well, shit, man! Of course they’re here. Everyone’s got everyone’s back here, right? Everyone’s beautiful here. We’re different!” Karl laughs. “She must feel so blessed to have found such a fine group of people.”

“Maybe she’s a different kind of bulb. Maybe she’ll change us.”

Karl looks at me for a long time, reading me. How far down does my belief in what I just said go?

“Be careful you don’t shine too bright yourself, Nick.”

Then he smiles, shifting gears. No one wants to be a downer. These parties are about having a good time, about leaving all that negativity at the door. We’ll get back to it soon enough.

“Well… I think the Magician of the River Valley needs to make his rounds. Catch the last few fine folks still searching for blotter-based enlightenment.”

“Why don’t you just show them a few card tricks?”

“Not as much money in that.”

“Why do you think we’re here, Karl?”

“Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a side effect of the mellow contemplative phase.”

“Touche.”

“So?”

Karl’s eyes shift left, off into some distant, private world. He looks back at me with a smirk. “Where else do you know where you can believe that magic is real and without consequence?”

There was eternity just a minute ago. One endless, flowing moment – like the night was going to go on forever. And then some bugger hit the fast forward button and it’s the last song and only the die-hards are up on the floor. Most have left, and the rest are cuddled up against the walls, staring out tiredly at a sea of discarded water bottles and glow sticks.

~ Mark ~

It’s 7:30AM on a Sunday morning, and we’re all in the afterglow – calm and content, but not quite ready for sleep just yet. We walk into the local Denny’s and immediately draw stares from the staff and the other patrons, most of which are families dressed in their Sunday best, just catching a quick round of bacon and eggs before they go off to their weekly service.

“I guess we should have taken some of this off before we came in,” Nick says. Everybody looks to see how we’re still covered, head to toe, with dead glow bracelets, necklaces, and other party wear.

“Just make sure you get it all off before you make your transformation into Mr. Responsible on Monday morning,” Celeste chides.

“Think I can leave the nail polish on?” he asks.

“Well, unless they put a black light in your cubicle, I doubt anyone’s gonna notice.”

“That was some trippy shit, C!” pipes CJ. “I totally forgot about it. Then I go and look down at my hands, and it’s like, what the fuck! Why am I glowing?”

“They don’t call her the dollar store diva for nothing!” I say.

“Hey, dick!” Celeste shoots back, gently elbowing me. “I’ll have you know I paid good money for that stuff!”

We all order our greasy food and we talk back and forth about nothing in particular, laughing and enjoying the scene we’re making. Some poor kid looks over at CJ and CJ stares the kid down. He’s still wearing his sunglasses and he’s looking a bit like Mr. T with all that jewelry. He really went over the top with his getup for this party. God, what a riot! Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned and plan to do so again at the next available opportunity, amen!

The kid’s dad sees his petrified son, jaw dropped, staring at CJ, and he scolds the kid, tells the kid to just finish the meal quick and don’t get distracted, flashes an irritated glare at Celeste, Nick, myself, and lets it settle for a moment longer on CJ. It’s a pissing contest and good ol’ CJ stands his ground, smiling peacefully from behind his shades.

“How’d you like those Blue Diamonds, C?” CJ says, turning away from looking at the father and back to us. Breakfast’s here now and we’re all shoveling the food in. Dance for ten hours straight and you work up quite an appetite.

“A bit speedy,” Celeste reports, “But a lot better than those Yellow Supermen you had last week.”

“Superman!” the kid screams, catching a piece of the conversation, and we all nearly choke on our food, letting out covert snickers.

“Finish up!” the father says sternly.

He looks at all of us like we were personally responsible for every shit deal he’s ever gotten in life. The contempt I see irritates me as much as it amuses me.

“Amazing the people they let in here, huh?” I say to my friends, but I’m really speaking to him. I watch as the muscles in his face shift ever so slightly. I smile at the sudden rigidity of his movements. His wife puts her hand on his and gives him that please don’t make a scene look. She glances at us and then looks back down to her meal.

~ Nick ~

We all pretend to concentrate on our food. The family soon leaves. They try to make it look natural, but it’s all very hushed and frantic.

Celeste picks up some piece of fluff from the table between her fingers and starts it hopping along the table like a rabbit as the waitress arrives with the bill.

The waitress stands there, transfixed. We’re all waiting for her to say something, but it’s as if time itself had decided to take a smoke break. I worry for a moment that she’s going to rag on us for disturbing everyone’s church vibe. Then she looks at Celeste and the fluff in her hand and smiles and starts one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever heard.

“My little boy died of Leukemia,” the waitress says, voice trembling slightly.

“I’m so…” Celeste starts, but before she can hit sorry, the waitress continues…

“He loved bunnies.” She bites her lip and we all shift in our seats, hoping she doesn’t break down in tears. I’m not saying that we’re all heartless. It’s just that everyone else in here would get the wrong idea. They’d all think it was something we did on purpose. I can already feel the stares in our direction.

The silence becomes almost unbearable before she starts talking again.

“Every time I see something that makes me think of bunnies, it’s like he’s trying to communicate with me, telling me he’s okay up there in heaven.”

“Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” CJ says solemnly.

Mark looks at me, appropriately solemn, but also with that Can you fucking believe this? amusement that he always seems to have when something strange happens.

“It’s alright. He’s been gone for a while now, and I know he’s in a good place. I’ll see him again one day, too.”

“That you will, ma’am, that you will,” CJ replies with such shocking sincerity that I begin to wonder if he really didn’t supply at least half of last night’s party people with their drugs.

The waitress is all smiles that this fine young man shares her view of the afterlife. Mark rolls his eyes.

“Here,” says Celeste, a dead serious look on her face. She hands the waitress the piece of fluff. “For your son.”

Mark and I look on in fascinated horror as the waitress accepts the piece of fluff with cupped hands like it was her son himself.

Oh my! Only sweet Celeste could pull something like that off, and she doesn’t even realize how odd the whole exchange was.

But it was so genuine that none of us mentions it as we leave the restaurant. It was a holy moment, and we all know it, and we’ll all be damned if we’re going to mess with that sort of thing.

The Gospels tell the story of a man who reached out to the common people of his time. Instead of appealing to their fears, he appealed to their hopes, their mercy, and their sense of justice. His purpose was not to divide them, to goad them into seeing one another as enemies. Instead, he attempted to unite them, so that they could all pursue a common good.

Jesus Christ was a grass roots community organizer before the term was invented. He and his followers were drawn together by faith — his faith in them and theirs in him.

But as Jesus stubbornly and unflinchingly pointed out the corruption of the old system to anyone who would listen, he began to anger the ruling elite. Everyone knows the story. He was turned over to the authorities by one of his own disciples and sentenced to death for sedition. When given a final chance to avoid the death of God’s only son, the masses, incited by their religious leaders, cried, “Kill him!” Sound familiar?

Now, I am not suggesting that Barack Obama is Jesus Christ. Beyond the lack of any solid evidence that Jesus indeed existed and that the “eye witness” accounts of his life were accurate, the character of Jesus represents an integrity that no mortal being could ever presume to possess. As with the myths of every culture, the reality of the Gospels is not found by historical fact checking. It is found within. Jesus Christ represents an ideal that, on some level, we all strive towards. If that wasn’t the case, the story would never have been so compelling.

But this story also points out a darker reality: we are apt to do whatever is necessary to keep our beliefs intact, even if that means destroying something good. And the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, if anything, should be a warning against going down that road.

I know it might be more fun to look for “evidence” that debunks evolution, to weave coincidental streams of prophecy with random verses, to quote passages as “proof” that God hates homosexuals and is against abortion, or to pretend that The Book of Revelation was more than the ravings of a mad man. But to those of us on the outside, such expressions of belief suggest that the life and death of Jesus, fictional or not, mean very little to you.

Mrs. Palin, you know that your statements about Barack Obama’s association with Bill Ayers have nothing to do with meaningful debate. At their source is a cynicism that has almost completely corrupted your party. You must believe that if you can fill your supporters’ minds with fear and hate, they will remain blissfully ignorant of any of your own failings — or those of John McCain. And I have to admit that after seeing some of the videos floating around of your supporters, your tactics seem to be working. The rest of us might look on in horror, wondering how anyone could let their minds be so lazy as to not do the simple math in calculating Obama’s age (eight years old) at the time the Weather Underground was active. We might be flabbergasted as to why your most vicious supporters can’t seem to understand that by your standards of “palling around with terrorists”, you indict most of your fellow Republicans — yourself and your husband included. But it seems to be working at your rallies.

Here’s the thing. You’re most likely going to lose this election. And you know that this is what should happen to anyone who has a platform that is inconsistent with reality and who has run a campaign lacking substance and tact, such as the one you’re running. The problem is, you’re riling up a bunch of really stupid people right now. The ones who are making the “Obama Bin Lyin” signs and the “Barack Hussein Obama” references and who yell “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” at your rallies are people who need to be handled very carefully. These are the kind of blind patriots who perpetrated the atrocities at Abu Ghraib — and September 11, 2001 was a blessing to them because it gave them a small corner of reality to pin all their vicious intolerance to.

I don’t fear that your tactics will work before election day. I fear that they will work after.

I think your running mate has since recognized the dangerous possibility that one of his supporters might vote with a bullet. John McCain may be out of touch and letting his ambitions get the better of him, but he still has a conscience. He also knows that it is within his power to provoke or discourage such behavior.

To change course now — to waiver and rebuke his own supporters for making spurious associations about Barack Obama’s middle name, his Muslim father (as if that faith is any worse or any better than yours), or working on a charity board with a reformed former militant — might be to precipitate the final nail in the coffin of John McCain’s presidential race. But it is the closest he’s come in the last few months to that storybook character in a POW camp in Vietnam who wouldn’t leave until his fellow prisoners were released. It is doing what he said he would do — putting country before party. And I would even say it’s heroic — if you weren’t doing his dirty work for him.

I don’t know if it is truly what John McCain wants, or if you are being pushed to be his attack dog by the Republican party, but now is your chance to be a true maverick. With less than a month to go until the election, you can use your voice at your rallies to prepare your supporters for what you have been teaching them to hate and fear: President Obama. You can use that hockey mom, small town style to admit that you got caught up in something you really weren’t prepared for, said a few things you regretted, and now want to set the record straight. Because of your roots, you have a certain charisma that appeals to the American psyche. Stop letting it be used by the Republican party to wage a not only dirty, but dangerous, last few days of an election campaign. If you and John McCain spend even a few moments of every speech repairing the damage that has been done, you will still lose the election, but you will lose it with dignity. And I can’t imagine a single, decent American who wouldn’t respect you for that.

I don’t question that any candidate in this election is not doing what he or she thinks is right — only, at times, his or her wisdom. I hope you will come around before it’s too late. I look forward to seeing America turn once again into that shining example of freedom that it used to be.

Yours sincerely,

David Scott

The rest of the day, I imagine how much this technology will improve and how much it will shake up the manufacturing industry when we can simply print off the goods we need from designs that can be spread at the speed of thought. We are living right now with the power to do things that were not so long ago the domain of science fiction — and it’s an amazing time to be alive.

After having exhausted all the great possibilities of the convergence of 3D printing, nanotechnology, and industry, I come back to my senses and realize we’ll most likely use it to build better bombs.

Because, make no mistake, they are out to get us. And the only way to really make sure that doesn’t happen is to get them first. For as it has been known in every sketched out moment of Western life: When you can’t trust anyone, you need to be able to control it all — and to do that for any reasonable length of time, you’ve got to have good bombs.

The frisbee seems to almost stand still as I jump. I pluck it out of the air, spin around, and throw it back. The next throw is a long one, and I’m so focused on it that I almost back into a group of baby boomers who all give me dirty looks.

At some point it occurs to me that the piece of plastic we’re throwing back and forth is really just an excuse for grown men and women to dance in a field — because once you get the basics of catching it down, the real pleasure is in the flow of your movement, in how gracefully you can grab onto it and then let go.

Somehow the need for a purpose to dance around like a fool (if that is what one feels like doing at any particular moment) seems silly. Then again, there are many harmless things which we nevertheless learn are wrong, and the more we learn of these things, the closer we come to being all grown up.

But in this moment, I’m back to looking at the world through the eyes of a child, where everything is an adventure and your only duty is to make sure you and your friends are having fun. I wonder if we all should have perhaps taken the art of play more seriously. After all, when we’re not busy playing, we tend to be busy worrying about our salvation and waging wars.

We’ve been taught to stop believing in the Bogeyman, but that doesn’t keep him from existing. He’s that rogue nation, that sleeper agent, that quiet guy sitting next to you on the bus, mind boiling, waiting for a chance to strike. When we were younger, we could stay safe by making sure to check under our beds and by keeping a close watch on our closets. Now, we realize that the price of that feeling of safety has become our eternal, neurotic vigilance.

Born again fighter pilot and president George W. Bush was legendary in his battles with the Enemies of Freedom™ in the early dark days of the new millennium. It was a long, hard road, littered with billions of oil soaked dollars and a seemingly bottomless downward spiral of esteem from the greater world community, but it was what America needed to ensure its security from lunatics waving box cutters.

However, George Bush, even after all of his great achievements, only laid the groundwork for possibly the greatest hero of our time…

You could barely tell during the September 26, 2008 debates, but hidden under John McCain’s well starched suit was a jet pack with enough fuel to fly him personally back to Washington D.C., just in case the Economy starts to suddenly crumble and he needs to hold the entire thing on those fierce, war hardened, seventy-something shoulders.

John’s the real deal. A fighter and a maverick. An honest to God American hero. And you can bet all your hard earned money that he’ll muscle his way through those Washington fat cats and fix this rogue economy once and for all.

No one could have ever predicted the problems on Wall Street before President Bush announced them — but only John McCain had the lightning fast reflexes to halt his campaign in its tracks and save the day. And rest assured, he will win the war with the economy — or die trying!

Speaking of death, there are some who are silly enough to worry over John’s health… What these people fail to recognize is that God has personally (personally!) picked an even better fighter, a more mavericky maverick… a woman who has stared into the evil eyes of Vlad Putin all the way across the Bering Strait and literally froze the Russian Prime Minister in his place. If there’s anyone left wondering why the KGB hasn’t been knocking at his door over the last eighteen months, he has only to look to hockey mom Sarah Palin.

Make no mistake, this is a ticket backed by Jesus Himself. And there are still too many good old boys out there who know better than to put their trust in a black man.

Let’s just take a look at the real issues for a moment: Most of the world — comprised of godless idiots spouting nonsense about evolution and planets rotating around the sun — is under the mistaken impression that it’s more than a few thousand years old. Some of them smoke pot. Some of them are gay. Some of them try to compete with Freedom™, offering up their own dangerous versions which don’t include such necessities as warrantless wire taps, offshore concentration camps, and terrorist watch lists complete enough to include everyone five years old and up. They are a bunch of sissies who have the completely unpatriotic audacity to question authority.

And they all believe in killing babies. That’s right. Killing babies — long before they can be sent into places like Iraq or Afghanistan to get their arms and legs blown off in the name of their country. It’s as if these people don’t know that the only choice a woman should ever have is whether or not her son or daughter will die for Freedom™.

Only the most stubborn, immoral freaks could in good conscience vote for a man like Obama, a man who acts like these important issues don’t even exist.

Remember, boys and girls, the ancient wisdom of The Book of Revelation — he will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time. One must be eternally and neurotically vigilant.

What’s with all these distractions, like the middle class and health care and education? Energy independence? If God was able to guide his prophet Sarah Palin in building the Alaskan pipeline, don’t you think He can guide her in solving America’s energy problems? That is, if He even needs to solve the energy problems. Don’t forget that the Second Coming is long overdue.

Yes, my friends, these are exciting times! And if you’re a fellow Canadian, you not only have the privilege of watching how things are done in a real country — you get to play along too. The hope is that we’ll be so blinded by the political wrestling match to our south that we won’t even notice Slick Steve Harper weasel his way into another minority government. Once firmly in place again, he and his party will be able to redouble their efforts to stick us with ridiculous copyright legislation, chip away at our constitution, and sell off our natural resources to countries that can manage them better. But really, if you can forget about the party that introduced it for just a moment, you have to admit that Slick Steve did a great job slashing the GST.

Sure he might just seem like a slightly smarter version of G-dubya, taken down to a CBC-approved level of production quality, but if we’re gonna get to hang with the big kids, we need someone willing to kiss each and every ass, and we need a party that can show its true inner pimp and sell us out to whoever’s buying. And for that sacred job, there’s no one better than Slick Steve and his merry Alliance of Conservatives.

God willing, Harper, Palin, and McCain (though he may not live to see the promised land) will lead us all into yet another decade full of fear and trembling.

Is it worth the effort to try and improve oneself, to learn some skill or gain some measure of wisdom? Is it worth the effort to get to know this person? Is it worth the effort to stick around — or to leave? Is it worth the effort to be strong and hopeful when life can just seem so damn cruel sometimes? And should I even get out of bed this morning? After all, what’s it all for, anyway?

The haunting reality is that we’re never really sure. We can ignore the question. We can give a group, nation state, or spiritual leader the authority to answer the question for us. We can even confront it directly, turning ourselves into metaphysical Don Quixotes, losing ourselves in a mad and romantic fantasy that one day we will grab hold of the secret, that once and for all, we will be certain!

But the monster will always lurk somewhere in the corner of our minds, waiting for signs of weakness, waiting for us to ask the question again, this time without the protection of an answer. It’s a franchise horror movie villain like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. We can fight it off for a while, but it will never truly die. There will always be the possibility of a sequel.

The next time someone asks you whether or not you’re a spiritual person, check your pulse. Is your heart still beating? You just might find the truest, most genuine faith in that space between one beat and the next.

And if so, what sense is there in asking whether you need to be more spiritual or less spiritual or whether you’ve chosen the right flavor of spirituality? Wouldn’t most genuinely spiritual people agree that, so long as it keeps the monster at bay, it is good enough?

If I could make one humble suggestion, however, it would be to measure any sort of spiritual growth by your capacity to feel joy rather than your capacity to endure pain.

It’s not that one way is any more correct than the other. It’s just that there are more than enough gloomy little people running around, proclaiming that evil is abound, the end is near, and that you need to sacrifice and purify yourself for what comes next. It’s great if such cynicism works for them, but you must always keep in mind that they really don’t know any better than you what it’s all about — no matter what their credentials are or who they pretend to speak for. So why not follow a path that makes you happy?

Perhaps whatever it is that created you requires nothing more from you than your willingness to just do your thing for as long as you can.

For those of us who seek the Truth, God, or Enlightenment, do we seek these for their own sake, or do we seek them because seeking is just our thing? After all, the Truth is right in front of us, God is present in us and all around us, and what exactly is holding us back from Enlightenment?

Maybe there is nothing to seek. If it makes life seem more worthwhile, then seeking is, of course, a very important activity — but the person who does not seek is no less spiritual, no less aware of what’s actually going on. Because none of us really knows what’s actually going on. It’s all guesswork.

Could the proverbial seeker learn a thing or two from the proverbial couch potato? Sure, he may lack ambition and finesse, but he’s fully absorbed in what he’s doing, and he makes no apologies for it. There’s something sort of heroic and noble about that. He’s fighting the monster like everyone else, and he’s not even breaking a sweat.

This whole thing we’re doing seems fundamentally odd. Why have any of it? Forget about trying to find the meaning of life. Rather, ask yourself: what possible meaning could it have, in and of itself? And behind this question, you’ll find the monster baring its sharp, white teeth.

I walk along some random street and hear the splish-splash of rain drowning out every other sound. Hundreds of strange faces hustle about with the most sincere importance, each hiding an entire universe of memory and longing. The street we’re standing on turns upon this gigantic sphere orbiting around a huge ball of fire that orbits, along with other huge balls of fire, around some incredibly massive center. That center is one of many such centers, all of them suspended in an incomprehensibly vast pool of nothingness. In this moment, I know all I need to know about the meaning of life. This is it. This, right here, is the answer. I know also that as soon as I try to put it into words, to use it to explain my past or to convince myself of any particular future, that it will disappear as quickly and mysteriously as it came.

There is a spectacular dance going on here, and I am reminded that no one who really enjoys dancing does it for any particular purpose.

As I look deep into the monster’s eyes, I discover the soul of the savior, for they are one in the same — yin and yang. I see that life springs from poetry as much as poetry springs from life, that there is a certain seductive cadence to it all. I breath in and I feel the beginning. I breath out and I feel the end. I see the end become the beginning even as the beginning becomes the end, and I know!

I know that it’s all moving along as it should. There’s no urgent need for me to fix it, to tamper with it, to somehow make it better than it is right now. So far, it has done an alright job on its own. It flows naturally from one perfect moment to the next for anyone who cares to notice.

And now, if I sit very still and pay attention to what’s going on around me, I might start to wonder where exactly it is that “I” begin and end. Am I my thoughts? Am I my body? Am I my future or past? Am I the person I think I am, or who others think I am? Am I all of these things? Or am I none of them?

If I dig down really deep to that core essence that has somehow stayed with me, unchanged, through twenty seven years of constant change, what will I find? How can it be so familiar and yet so elusive?

In silence, beyond words and thought, I touch this essence for the briefest moment, and I am at peace. My eyes open and I look upon the world with a new sense of wonder.

In every face, every tree, every stone, every brush of wind, in the sunlight and in the darkness, there is that same essence, unchanging and eternal, which is found in the depths of my own Self. It is in the rise and fall, in the creation and destruction. It is all things. And it is none of them.

Every now and then, I’m asked what I think heaven will be like, and I always find it to be a very difficult question to answer. To be honest, I don’t worry too much about whether there is one or, if there is, whether I’ve been good enough to go there when I die. What I fear is that I won’t know I’m in heaven, that I could walk right through paradise without even taking a second glance at it. What a shame that would be.

And there’s a nagging suspicion that this is exactly what I’ve been doing for all this time.

So I sometimes imagine that on some very ordinary day, I’ll be walking along and be struck suddenly by a strange feeling. There I’ll be, standing in some familiar place, realizing that I had never recognized it for what it really was until now. And I will know that I am there.

When that moment arrives, I plan to have a good, long laugh at my ignorance — and then, at last, to become forever lost in the dance.

Among other things, my generation has been called the MTV Generation — whatever that’s supposed to mean. Being of the MTV Generation, I’m not a fan of the label. In fact, my generation doesn’t like being put in a box — unless you define your own box, that is. And right there is something that’s actually sort of interesting about us.

How does it feel to be in your twenties in the new millennium? Well, sort of like you were born in the wrong decade. You see, I don’t think I’m alone in my alienation. Alienation is a key aspect of being young right now.

We are a generation of borrowers. The rave scene’s just an electronic rehash of the sixties. The drugs aren’t even all that new — at least, not the good ones. The goths? Well, you’ll find the most characteristic roots somewhere back in Victorian era literature. How about emo? One part fifties innocence and clothing, two parts nineties self-loathing, and a pinch of sixties psychology. It may look new, ladies and gentlemen, but you can bet your bottom dollar it’s a remix of times gone by.

Do we have anything of our own? Even the feeling that we will live to see the end of the world is just a Hollywood remake of Cold War fear. We don’t even have that. And we know it. And the fact that we know we can never really do anything original really sucks. Sometimes I just want to forget about it, go to the mall, and play video games. And right there is something that’s actually sort of interesting about us.

To all my fellow shameless borrowers, I’d like to suggest something that we can call our own: We are the first generation to be truly aware of its own absurdity.

In fact, I’m so aware of my own absurdity that I’m almost afraid to be writing this. After all, it had to have already been claimed by some other generation or some other author. This can’t be a new discovery. And even if it was, would it not just be a shameless attempt to be a “voice of my generation”, which, after all, has been done before ad nauseam?

You see, even as I form these thoughts, I’m criticizing them. How ridiculous! This is, like, so post-modern it’s not even funny.

Hey, old timers! You wonder why we’re so scatterbrained sometimes? You try analyzing everything you do and see how well you can concentrate.

My generation won’t need the next to open up our yearbooks and snicker at how foolish we all were. We already know. We know that every style and every trend will fade. In every new thing, we see its demise and its subsequent resurrection.

Fuck. I think I’m getting a headache.

Look at that. Dropping the “F” bomb to show a bit of edge. I know I won’t get away with it, so I thought I’d point it out, you know, to make sure you know that I know.

The more I look at it (and, to be honest, the more I look at all of this), the more it all bothers me. It’s like I’m simply parodying someone who’s already been down this road and understood it better. Because, instead of Jiminy Cricket sitting on my shoulder as a child, I had Siskel and Ebert. And they taught me to dig deep.

So why did I even start writing this, then? What possessed me to do it? Who did I think I was fooling? What was I thinking!?!

I guess all I can really say in my defense is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Meanwhile, Patrick and I are being driven mad trying to find an open grocery store to get some good breakfast and lunch food (while spending 10–15 euro on dinner is not incredibly traumatic, spending the same on breakfast and lunch seems a bit extravagant). One is tempted to share the schizoid paranoia of Kesey’s narrator… perhaps the Germans know our plans and have hired a huge group of people to move the buildings, piece by piece, before we arrive. Or maybe they’re turning out the lights just as we’re about to round the corner, all current customers hiding behind the shelves. Just another closed store, boys! Move on through! Danke shen!

This is new to me. And it reminds me that with every new experience, there’s another old assumption that gets broken. Here in Dresden, you are hard pressed to find any necessity shopping (or any sort of shopping that’s not totally tourist-based) on a Sunday. Most places are closed. And even if they’re open, they’re hard to spot. The telltale look of a Safeway or an Extra Foods or a Sainsbury’s (for the Brits among us)? Oh no. Nothing so simple. “Look for anything that says ‘Markt’,” Patrick says. And more likely than not, it’s going to be at the bottom of some apartment building with nothing but a small sign to announce its presence.

We never found the groceries, but I did manage to get a more comprehensive look at Dresden. Bombed out cathedrals, forested areas in the middle of the city (apparently, it’s one of the greenest cities in Europe), castles, and colorful, sometimes abandoned, mansions were the scenery for our grocery hunt. I think the absence of cheap food for a day was a worthwhile trade for taking a scenic route to nowhere in particular.

That night I got a guided tour of the old town area, and all those big old buildings, interesting enough just to look at them, took on the dimension of history. At one point, we arrived at a church with some black bricks mixed among the whitish ones. “During the war,” Patrick explained, “About two thousand people hid in this church. It never got hit. They considered it a miracle. Then about two days after the bombing run, after all the people had exited the church, the pure heat generated from the bombing in the area caused the building to basically explode. Look, there’s a chunk of it there.” And I saw a large piece of stone that had obviously been left in its exploded position as a reminder of what happened here.

There are a lot of people who say the bombing of Dresden was itself a war crime. No military installations, no real value in defeating the Nazis. Of course, the hawks will argue that there were offices, etc. here that were of strategic importance and that, during the war, the lives of a thousand Germans were not worth as much as the life of one of the Allied forces. It’s tempting, given the evil that the country as a whole committed, to go along with that. Then again, the guys flying planes into buildings a few years back also felt they were fighting a greater evil. I think most of the more neutral players in the world would disagree with the validity of both attacks.

“One must be careful when fighting monsters, lest one becomes a monster oneself.“
~ Nietzsche

War tends to make us all into monsters. It’s a difficult task to not go over that line. Have we in North America become the monster? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a monstrosity of a different kind. More subtle than that of Germany during the 30s and 40s. We don’t conquer with guns any more. We conquer with the weight of our money and our technology. We can sweep whole cultures away with debt relief and a few McDonald’s. But gosh, even as I criticize my imperialistic roots, I can’t help but be incredibly comforted when I’m scared and lost in a foreign country — to suddenly turn and see a familiar conquering piece of corporate America. Finally, something like home!

The church was rebuilt. That’s why you see the white stones. They’re the new ones. The iron in the stone oxidizes over the years, turning the old ones to black. Give the new ones a few hundred years and eventually even the stains of war will be washed from this city.

Here I am, wandering around like a madman, eyes filled with the tragic beauty of autumn. Old things are dying to make way for the new. Whispers of winter float through the warm air. Soon enough it will just be too damn cold for anything to spark.

Nature bewitches me with its last celebration before the big freeze. Suddenly, there are all these brilliant, earthy colors. While spring and summer shine with the overt beauty of a Hollywood actress, all glossed up and perfect for the big screen, autumn is that sweet girl next door who brings back your childhood innocence — the one who makes you smile just thinking about her. It’s real and genuine. The time slows and you savor the simplest moments. You find yourself wishing those moments could last forever.

I have no destination today, but even a person with no destination always finds himself somewhere. I wonder why it took me so long to be where I am right now?

There are others: sitting and writing, some playing Frisbee, some just passing by. The air is electric and I’m grinning ear to ear. I’m ready for a revolution, and I’m nodding in agreement with everything around me.

These people. As I observe them, there’s that awful, hanging question: How many of them are observing me? And how closely? To answer that, I guess I first have to answer an even more haunting question: Who am I, really?

You see, somewhere in here, there’s this person I call me, who’s made of some arbitrary collection of experiences, relationships, ideas, dreams, and biology. Something beyond that me seems to be creating a movie about life itself, about what it means, about how it’s beautiful or horrifying or worthwhile or not.

Who am I, really? Today, it almost seems like I am that movie director who is beyond me, but who is also within me. How can that be? And do I not also feel that I am the actor, the one who is being directed? What about the others? Are they actors or audience? Or both?

Are they actors in my movie, or am I an actor in theirs?

This particular movie screen is different because it’s a two-way deal. The actors are also looking back out at the audience, as if they don’t know they are the actors. I see now that we are one in the same, actors and audience, and that we are all playing incredibly complex and beautiful roles in this incredibly complex and beautiful drama, called: “This is What Life’s All About!”

Eventually, I push myself to leave. I look back to where I was sitting moments ago and taste an overwhelming melancholy. Outside of the moment, I now fully realize its wrenching beauty, and I wonder why I didn’t just stay there forever.

What is it that continually pushes us out of Eden? Why are we always looking backward or forward? Why are we never just there?

Nostalgia. Hold on to it, and you’re looking back five years from now, feeling the same regret about not enjoying what you had because you were just too busy wishing it was another way.

The solution suddenly seems much too simple: Let go.

Let life throw me about as it wills. Understand that I would not want it any other way. No effort. No struggle. Just a profound and protecting peace, knowing that I am exactly where I need to be and doing exactly what I need to do. I wonder why my life so far has been more of an exercise in complexity than simplicity.

But then, the simplest things can be incredibly difficult sometimes, can’t they?

I wave goodbye and lose myself in a maze of side streets. There are these beautiful old houses, each one with its unique, magical character, and I feel a bit like I did as a small child. Curiosity. Wonder. Love. When exactly did I start to need more than that? I feel like skipping and twirling in spirals through the streets, like I would if I were an actor in a musical, but an adult doesn’t do such silly things. There was a time for that and now it’s gone. That’s what it means to grow up, right? Apparently, as one gets older, the time is for any joyless and needless sacrifice to masquerade itself as wisdom.

Time. I’m suddenly not so sure there’s much sense in keeping track of it any more. Why count down the seconds towards an uncertain future? Why stare longingly into a fading and fictional past? It’s a pretty magical world out there — and things are changing by the minute. Why not just flow with the Tao?

And so I come full circle, back to the beginning of this strange day, inside a moment that is enough to justify all of existence. You see, in this particular moment, I can’t help the feeling that I’m sitting in the very center of things — at the center of the magic theater. All of these sounds… all at once. I’m finding my zen in the splash of the legislature fountains, as would be the classic image… but also in the rise and fall of engines as these big metal beasts race all around me on various streets that surround this oasis of serenity. It all seems so distant, yet so close. So familiar.

I watch a kid with his parents. The kid is rolling on the ground beside his dad. They look down, amused by their son’s choice of travel. He simply refuses to walk. It’s more fun rolling, even if it is more difficult to make turns that way.

Kids are pretty cool. I envy the joyous freedom that I see, and I wonder again when exactly it was that I gave that freedom up. I don’t even remember putting up a fight.

But then, this has always been our journey — the rediscovery of what we’ve always known, the recovery of what we’ve always had.