The cricket monster set out for the day. Her goal? Make it to the flagpole and back--that had been easy for her just one year ago and now she had been working towards this simple task for weeks. She wished that she wouldn't live forever; after all, everything would be so much simpler if she knew that there would some sort of definite ending. But forever stretched before her like a rope made out of gum and she couldn't think any more about this at the moment because she had to get to that damn pole.
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The key isn't telling people that you understand them or that you have similar experience to theirs. Detailing your own abuse It isn't central to understanding your friend's heartbreaking account of rape. Relational equality is not a measure of experiential equality; relational equality is a measure of the support that comes from someone who may or may not have actually experience what you're feeling. There's beauty in allowing a friend's words to fall from their lips, float in the air, and accept them as nothing more and nothing less than what they are. There's beauty in listening, even when you both know that there's nothing that you can (or should) say in response.
Such a wholesome word. Which I guess makes sense, given what tradition literally is and I don't have the correct description for why 'tradition' and 'wholesome' are pretty much synonyms, but let's not get too focused on that. You all know what I'm talking about.
But when tradition is racist and wholesome fun involves violence and the past suddenly takes on a much darker tint than we would like to admit our contributions to, is this still a way of life that we want to cocoon ourselves in? Yes, it may be tradition to curl up by the fire with a fleece blanket after Christmas dinner and listen to Grandpa Pete talk about the days of yore and all that's changed compared to the traditions of his memory and laugh with everyone and generally feel snuggled and cozy and warm and, essentially, imbued with the wholesomeness of tradition. Chocolate coated. Coat coated human. Sugar-coated truths. These are the first three things that coats remind me of and I wonder if there's a correlation for the three items and their decreasing relative levels of sweetness. Chocolate coated strawberries or marshmallows or cakes are, literally, sweet. A human being, bundled up against the cold in a lush parka, may or may not have a sweet demeanor. I mean, hopefully being warm would raise their spirits considerably if the alternative would be lacking the parka and, therefore, freezing in the cold? But sugar as a disguise for something altogether bitter and much too complicated to be made tolerable by a dusting of white powder? I should think that the deceptive nature of this sugar would render any of its physical sweetness a toxic impostor.
Indeed, we often like to think that we can cover up the tastes, the sights, the memories, the mistakes, the lies, the past with sprinkling of something more palatable; but in reality, it is this additional compound, this attempt to alter what is, that may be the greater poison. I have never been "camping" camping -- like the rustic, in-the-woods-Nick-Offerman-style of camping. Girl Scout camps? Yes, of course. Expensive day/week camps during the summer? Check. But the camping of family bonding so depicted in The Parent Trap (the Lindsay Lohan version) and in Jane the Virgin and in National Lampoons? Not-a-once.
I mean, I'm not sure I would even enjoy camping that much (it seems like something that would get really old really fast). But it would have been nice to have gotten to try it before I came to that conclusion. You know? I wished that the cement would be torn up. They had just buried him alive under it and I wanted so badly to say goodbye and give him a proper memorial service.
I wished that when I was a younger, more naive man. Now I know that the only way to truly honor my brother is to find his goddamned will and force his scrawny bitch of a wife to fork over everything that she stole from me. |
Authormy mind is full of gibberish and this space will keep me sane. we have a love-hate relationship. Archives
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