Euripides
by G. Alexander Virden
copyright 1999 all right reserved
I know what they think of me, but they don’t have the guts to say it, even though they’d be right. They’d say I was mad and diseased. I am mad; mad at their world. Diseased I’m not, maybe in some small way by their standards, but not by mine. No, they don’t even know the meaning of disease. Their diseases just make you ill, others around you ill, or kill everybody in sight, but they can’t compare to what I’m carrying with me. That they couldn’t even put a name on it. Their technological minds that can put a computer on a thumbnail, dissect DNA, and read the chemical make up and temperature, of a planet’s atmosphere that the human eye can’t see with the biggest refractor telescope, but they can’t put a name, to what’s in me, if it was slapping them on the face and fucking em in the ass. That can’t put a name to anything they can’t see, touch, and analyze, analyze, analyze, quantify, digitize, box, and serve with toast. They can only theorize and that’s what makes them scared.
I’ve seen them all, standing there, looking through my eyes as if the were windows in a fish tank that held back crazy sea creatures no one could draw. The trick is not to flinch. If you flinch, weather they understand it or not, some part of them is relieved. If you don’t twitch, when you know they are looking inside, they can’t help but think there looking at a mirror, of the crazy things, that are swimming around inside of themselves and that they dare not name. The deeper they are, the more frightened they become. The more frightened they become, the more they hate me. So you have to look away if some one is too crazy, because they will see the crazy; squirming snakes in their own minds and they will want you dead for it, because they know you can see into them as deeply as they think they see into you. Their minds will not let them accept it is a mirror they look into. It is only their need to grip to some common fabric of society that keeps them from taking a literal dagger to your heart, to cut out what they see of themselves in there. They will attack your soul with the conscience of a sociopath and be prepared to sacrifice reality to kill anything you touch for life. Because they can’t let you exist, they can’t bare the truth, because they have made their choice to believe the lies. My father taught me this at a very early age.
This is why the downfall of heroes, is always depicted in some way as them playing by the rules. The proxy has been put forth, by those who would keep you in your place, that the true hero can only loose, because he must play by rules his opponent has no intention of keeping. That way, everyone can think that heros are idiots and not to be emulated. I say the true hero is the one that wins and that is why I’m bolted behind this door right now. This door in walls, built by so many rules, that no human could read them aloud in a life time. They keep you straight in so many ways. Being rich can protect you from these rules, that is why they make so many of them, to isolate themselves from, the huddled masses, and to keep them down. A minor infraction in speeding, for some one driving that flashy car, that cost more in one shot than most people will ever save in their entire life times, cost nothing. To a single mother, a young person getting started, or an old person struggling to get by, it can cost more than a weeks take home pay and then the forced insurance tax, gets hiked up for up to three and a half years. And they’ll be no public transportation safety net, because the rich will never pay for that, even though it could end the problem of drunk driving, ease the dependence on oil, and reduce the cost of keeping our road smooth and safe to drive on, because those are a lot of the things that fill the pockets of the wealthy. There is no teat like the government teat and it is only the wealthiest and connected one who get to drink the milk of that cow.
To someone trying to support a child that traffic ticket can be devastating and that’s just for a minor infraction of the rules. If they do manage to scratch out some savings, some equally banal misfortune, the car breaking down, or a sick child, will wipe them out, because you know medical care is only for the wealthy, the destitute who don’t fear bankruptcy, those serving time in our massive prison system of people who needed drugs to get by, stole to buy drugs, sold drugs to get their drugs, or killed some one because they couldn’t get drugs. Is that equal justice, not even our idiot hero would say yes to that. Even a rich person popping his legally prescribed Valium would say that, or if they did, they would know they were lying, but not care, because they know that’s one of the ways they keep the poor, poor, and the wealthy right where they are. And the war on drugs makes more people rich than the selling of drugs. Face it, whomever came up with a way to make urine worth forty dollars a pop was a fucking genius.
Equal justice is just one of the many lies, we must swallow and live with, or at least become indifferent to, my personal position of choice when I can manage it, when I am not so gripped with outrage that I am blind to what is for my own good. Take the simple traffic ticket screw up-one lost, or forgotten ticket, or having to decide between feeding your family and feeding a government who’s purpose is to serve the wealthy and maintain the status quo-for the most minor infraction, can make a person a fugitive. A wanted criminal. The ticket could pop up, he could be arrested at work, loose his ability to drive, his job, his family, go to prison, all because of doing something that almost every adult driver does at least once a day, speed.
This isn’t what happened to me. I learned a long time ago follow the rules and stay under the radar. You’ll never win against the beast, so be a smart boy, play only in your head. It’s just one of the things I think about when I’m alone. I have a lot of time to think about things as I drive around, looking.
A lot of people blame lawyers for the state of the world and they are certainly not without fault, but they are not the source. The source are those who pushed lawyers to find ways to steal from people who are without lawyers, or have less experienced lawyers. Lawyers are the chow dogs of the rich and some times the talented, but more often the untalented, because the untalented have to steal for a living. True talent resorts to these shamans in defense of their work from those who would steal it and turn it into homogenized blood pudding; with a shelf life of forever, because nothing living will ever grow there again. If the secret of art is released, the gods they have created, to control the minds of mass, will be desecrated it into shallow graves of alabaster roses that stink from the day they’re born and have thorns that suck blood, rather than draw it. It will be a fitting death.
I only whish I could be alive to see it, but I won’t be, I can’t last that long. Even if my mind could, my body wouldn’t. It’s about to fly apart. It has been for some time. If it wasn’t for the speed of the car and the pain. . . But how can you call release, pain? And that’s what it is, release. My body’s broken from a lifetime of shovels and sand bags. Even when the shovel was a phone and the sand bag a brown leather briefcase, I was broken by the wild escapes I attempted on nights and weekend, I defied death to take me. I dared death to take me, but he cheated me. Death would only take parts of me until he found a way to kill me and leave me breathing. Until he left me with one choice, to succor the wound, or to finish the job myself.
The pain will help. The hot 9mm stabbing my kidney. I could ease up my bloodless grip on the steering wheel, let my back relax just enough to ease away from the crushed velour seat, but then my body would fly apart and I would not be able to do what I need to do and I was almost to the school ground. I know he will be there. I don’t know how, but I know he will be there. I only wish I could go through time and kill the first one, the one that would save me from a life time of pain. But even that wouldn’t be soon enough. It’s not pain from the six years before I could understand, before I could read minds, before I knew what silence truly was and how it is obliterated by blindness. No this is a battle that has been raging for centuries, eons, thus my poetic name. Those of us, who see all things in truth, locked into a world of lies so strong, you must lie to survive, or suffer the fate I have chosen for myself. I wonder if there is some irony here that I am unaware of. If in some previous life, I made my world from lies and my penitence is to be crushed by my own honesty in this one. I can’t see the other lives clearly. I can only see my image stacked up as if I am standing centered between to wide mirrors, tilted just clever enough to go on forever, but close enough as to make the images blur into themselves. I can see different weights and scars, but it’s always me, because I always breed and it carries on that bad seed and so now you understand that the only way I can end the suffering is to end the breed. That’s me. Today.
Ah, the parking lot. Not the schools parking lot. This parking lot. Busy. Lot’s of coming and going. Lot’s of four door, egg shaped, cars that look just like mine, though they range in price from embarrassing to insulting. Mine is a GM. No one can tell it from any of the others. It’s a lie if they say they can, because there is no difference, not really. You could make them all at the same plant on different days, or even cheep before lunch and expensive after. You could even make the afternoon car last longer on cue, so that you could charge four times as much for the parts, because it’s so reliable, because they don’t break down as in leave you stuck out in the middle on dark roads where poor people live. They either have to pay the price, or be scared into to buying a new one, because they know the first part is not the last part, and the first part can be as much as a whole morning car of the same year. Who’s parts are cheeper and universal because everybody buys those, but the bolts are so loose, and the materials so cheap, the parts have to be purchased all the time, and they are left to wonder if maybe it wouldn’t have been cheaper to buy the afternoon car. Who’s buyers, after paying a price equal to three engines for the morning car, for glove box lights and power window motors, will go on insisting the cars are perfectly reliable, even though they’ve moved to Louisiana, because there any student with a decent grade average can get scholarships to an underachieving state or community college and that’s the only way you’re kid is going to school, if you are to keep driving a reliable car.
There he is. He’s on the jungle gym. He’s not by himself there are two little girls standing beside him as he hangs upside down, from his bent knees, and talks eagerly to them. There, he’s pushed it too far, this six year old who already understands torture, even though his home is in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The little girl is backing away from him and tagging her girlfriend to follow. She may or may not openly call him weird, or freak. She may be too afraid of him, even though she has no idea why. Her mind knows. Her basic instinct for survival knows. He’s not talking in the world that her parents explained to her and it’s not the one she knows from television. It’s one that talks from and to worlds and pieces of the soul that don’t belong to a six year old. He lives in a world and reality convinced of it’s omnipotence, while watching countless shows on endless channels, about men who thought they were gods. Men who had hundreds, thousands, put to death to keep their secrets, just to be hauled around the world, and put on display like the Ripley’s monkey that was sewn to a fish. Just something for some, out of work, farmer to stare at while scratching his nuts. He will find no answer for his bad luck, for his sorry life, because the secrets were kept, by the seal of death and the barrier of birth, we are doomed to think of reality in the aspect of a single life time.
The 9mm is no longer hot, but I still have proof that I had recently fired the weapon, legally. My signature at the firing range, will prove that and that is the only reason I doubt myself. The bullets have been hollowed out to a point that they will carry no shape. The lead, even if found, could not be conclusively put in my gun. If I’m going to run, how can I justify, what I’m going to do. If I am not willing to end my own suffering, how can I protest to end another's through benevolence? I am not Media, I am Juliet and this pistol my dagger. I can not rob anyone of the ecstasy of being alone with truth, in the fire of lies. Nor of the childhood pleasure of chasing fire flies. But I can say I have had all the ecstasy I can stand and now I can say goodbye to all their lies.
But there is no six year old on the jungle gym. School is not in session. And those girls that walked away from that strange boy did so over thirty years ago. I can’t shoot the little boy and stop the life time of pain, keep him from the monster that raised him, from those who would molest him. I can’t talk to the boy, and tell him, tell him to not listen to the lies, but to seek truth, because that is what he is doing, and there in lies his downfall, my down fall, I can’t accept the lies, and I can’t lie down and die, and I cannot walk through life nodding my head and swallowing shit as if it were Russian caviar, and French champagne. So I walk through life encased in a silent scream of terror of the undead that fill this world and circle around me. I can’t quit. They’ll just send me back again and again, until I succeed, or my soul is so overcome with grief that it fades from existence forever. So the only way is to face it: the pain, the anguish, my broken body, my unfulfilled dreams. Face it, separate myself from it, and go on. I must believe that a pure heart leads to paradise, whatever personal form it might take. Because I know the alternative, coming back again and again, starting over, with no clear knowledge of past mistakes to grow from, swimming in the lies the world tells to protect itself from the awful truth that our world has be co-opted by murderers and thieves, and that, that... is hell, in all the personal forms it can take and that, that... is something I know all too well, and cannot bear.
The End
Ozarts Inside Ozarts Grand View Stories By the Baron