The lion sleeps tonight

Previously posted last year on facebook, but i was thinking about it and wanted to repost it for the permanent record.




A truck backfires, for a moment drowning out the rumble of distant traffic. The grass is soft and moist, cold yet yielding. The smell of the dew far outpaced by the smells of the city, dirt, sweat, rotting food, rotting flesh. Steam rises from the sewer grates cascading across the landscape, obscuring the buildings a short distance from where the man lays motionless.
He is not asleep, nor is he truly a man. Of course, the definition of man is lost on him, almost as much as it is on us. The rites of passage in his world are more elusive in definition and clarity, but more readily apparent in their effect on someone. He is a teenager, a lone lost teenager under a bench.
It occurs to him briefly the chief reason for the bench, indeed for the park itself. He ever so gently fantasizes, just for mere moments about the family sitting down at the bench, enjoying the warm summer sun, combined with a beautiful spread of food fit for a king and his royal family. His stomach rumbles, and this forces him into action, even if it is just to roll over and suffocate these thoughts.
He’s not sure if his fantasy is anywhere near reality. He thinks back to his family outings, rare as they were. They always seemed to center around a bar. Ontario place for the air show, at a bar. Booze infested family dinners. His memories do not fill him with light.
He groans softly, realising his thoughts betray him, make him soft and weak and vulnerable. This will never do, not now, not later, not ever. He resolves then and there to be unquestioningly strong, unfailingly cold. Just like the morning grass.
The sun is threatening to bring its warm face out and mock the man-child. It seems lately like all the sun does is mock and cajole, promise light and warmth, but only bring exposure and boredom. All day, what does he have to do but wander and ponder? He’ll think about what led him to this spot, what made him the way he is, but in the end all he will find is silence, because the answer is so obvious that he should not even bother with the question. He did this. He made it. But still he looks for a place to lay the blame, some way to alleviate his anger by focusing the relentless rage.
He knows the rage will betray him as all his other emotions will. People use this to their advantage. Twisting, manipulating, cajoling him into action he previously would never have considered. But really, what is he now but a clean slate? A newly formed machine of cold unfeeling malevolence for those around him.
He tries to fight this, but knows he will lose. It is not mere abandonment he feels. Nor is it hopelessness. It is calm resolution. An acceptance of fate if you will.
The anger rises, tasting like bile in his throat, but of course it is the best thing he has tasted in three days, so he welcomes it. He wants to scream out. LOOK AT ME NOW! You say you care, you say you love me, but look at me now. Look at where I am, and what I am doing and tell me this is love, tough or otherwise.
This makes him ponder love. Has he ever really felt it? He has been told I love you, but like the ghosts of a thousand dreams, all those that say love with their lips, and even with their eyes, walk away. Is that love?
He knows in the back of his mind, and in the front of it when the sun crawls to its height and brings out all the happy souls for play, that things will get better. They will change as all things must. There is one small problem that he sees. It will get bad again. Then better. Then bad. The lesson his father imparted doesn’t leave him, and maybe he should be thankful for that at least. Life is a series of waves, sometimes you are cresting, riding high and feeling no pain, and sometimes you are in the trough, surrounded on all sides by your anguish and loneliness, engulfed by your sadness. This he now knows to be true.
Things will get better, and he will forget the lesson he learned that night. When he lets the emotions run and lets people in, he will feel pain because he knows no other way, knows no other form of living than this. As luck will have it though, there will be others to teach him this lesson over and over again. They will be unwavering in their support of the trough theory.
There is one final lesson the street will teach him that night, the lesson that will be his downfall for all eternity. Loneliness is a killer. Being alone in a city of millions makes a hard man crumble, and let us not forget, this is really not a man we are talking about. Loneliness will force him out from under the bench. Loneliness will introduce him to all sorts of wonders and he will ride high standing on top of the crest, his feet barely brushing the surface of the water, a smile on his face that no feeling person could resist. But loneliness will cause him to stop thinking and start feeling, and that he cannot allow, even though he will. The problem for him is not the people he chooses, it is in fact the people that choose him; that break their own waves across his body; that will search to use him to climb out of their trough, to avoid their loneliness, to embrace their darker passions.
You and I will come to doubt that he will need to be taught these lessons many more times before they make him or break him. But there is always once more. There is always that one last time to dream, to hope, to persist and to reach for the stars, because in the dead of night, all alone in a city of millions, the stars are your friends, and they are all just people who he has yet to meet, and a few of them will be the bright beacons in life that they are in the sky. This too he knows is true.

In which I blow up my world....

Rufus: He still digs humanity, but it bothers Him to see the shit that gets carried out in His name - wars, bigotry, televangelism. But especially the factioning of all the religions. He said humanity took a good idea and, like always, built a belief structure on it.
Bethany: Having beliefs isn't good?
Rufus: I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.


I use this little piece of dialogue from the fat man's epic religious movie because it is killing me to see the hypocrisy and lack of devotion to what is supposed to be core tenets of certain faiths.

I don't want this rant to turn in to, oh well you are talking about religion, not faith. To that end, let me neuter you now. Faith is a deeply personal matter which is between you and your God. It is only between you and your god and it takes place inside your own mind. It dictates your behaviour and informs your actions. Religion is what you project to the public. What you espouse to others and what you gather to celebrate. Any time you tell me what you believe to be the ultimate truth is in fact religion. It is a series of beliefs based on whatever text you tend to follow. If you want to tell me that there is a difference between what one believes and what one has faith in then you must give me a better argument, since in the end, actions speak louder than lip service.

All that being said, I am tired of closed minded lip service payment to ideals I hold dear.

You see, I believe everyone needs to be loved, and everyone needs to be accepted and treated with respect.

I am told that this is the main ideal of Christianity. I am told that Jesus was all about loving thy neighbour as thyself. A beautiful ideal to be sure, yet one no one seems to have a hold on in any meaningful way.

I heard this morning, a man claiming to be a christian in one breath, and calling a politician a whore and making fun of her.

"..just because she liked to sleep with oily drunk men..."

This was a characterization of something the woman said, without actual claim to her past. This christian decided to make fun of her and belittle her based on no evidence. He did not love his neighbour.

In the last few weeks, a man in the position of being a christian leader wanted to burn books and treat others with great disrespect. This man did not love his neighbour.

Last week, I was unable to do things on my own. I asked for help and was denied because the person projected their belief, which is not based on anything other than opinion over interpretation of sayings in a book. How can I say this? Well the fact is, they are putting their own belief on something they do not like, while ignoring the things that he does like which also break commandments. He did not love his neighbour.

I listened to two people argue over what damage atheism is doing to the world. One person claimed atheists are the worst thing in the world. He ignored the fact that as many atheists are working towards the betterment of their fellow man as Christians are. He ignored the fact that people like me devote their being to helping others and merely dismissed me and those like me as evil because we are not spreading the word of god.....as he sees it. He did not love his neighbour.

What do all these people have in common? They all not only claim ownership of the truth, but they also all influence the opinions of my friends.

I want to love my neighbour. I want to devote my life to improving the lives of others. I want to treat others with respect and caring.

I do not want to hold beliefs that would have me wish my son be stupid rather than gay.

I do not want to reject human beings because their beliefs are different than mine.

I do not want to belittle another person because I want to neuter their ideas.

Intolerance is not solely in the purview of the secular.

As I type this, a priest just said, and I quote: "you are like a chatty cathy doll, you never shut up." He does not love his neighbour.

I am tired, and I am not interested in hearing about how we can love god and not love each other.

Life is too short to live for death. Life is too long to live for yourself.

We need to look at our religious texts, and we need to look at them critically. We need to not blindly believe in something.

We need to see how the one hand says love, while the other teaches intolerance. We cannot pick and choose if we claim to believe in the word. We either believe in all the words, or we believe in none of them.

Picking and choosing which items are still relevant and which are outdated is ridiculous. I like this idea so I am going to go with it, but boy this is not tastey, let us reject it.

If you are going to reject homosexuality, then you must reject female teachers.

If you are going to reject premarital sex, then you must reject blind people.

When a person says it matters more what is in your heart, it doesn't mean that you get to ignore the other things, merely that following the rule of law is not enough.

Nowhere does Jesus reject the law, just that he claimed wanting to follow the law is not as important as believing in the law.

In the end, the only thing I want is to hold my own spirituality in my heart and spend my time making the world we live in a better place.

Too often people are only concerned with the afterlife. They see this world as flawed and not worth saving. Thus they work towards the next life. They believe in saving souls so they can join them in the afterlife.

I want to see this world improved. It is flawed. It is broken, and so are the people who live in it. I see it as a world worth saving. I see people as worth saving now.

When your belief is based on the destruction of the world, how can you work to improve the world? When all you do is designed to protect you when the world blows up, or you die, how can you work to make this life and this world better? You do not love your neighbour. You fear your god's wrath.

There is a war for my soul. It is happening here and now. I intend to give it back to me. I intend to be accountable to myself, my loved ones and my neighbour. I intend to let my neighbour define what loving them is, not some book which is full of intolerance and hate.



I know this will upset a number of people, but in the end, I cannot live with hypocracy and rejection.

I had a whole other entry lined up and scheduled. I have moved that schedule to another time in order to get the rest of this off my chest.

One final note to those who might say I am being selfish and hypocritical by rejecting some of my neighbours, I say this to you, I will love my neighbour until they reject my love and make it impossible for me to love them. There are tough choices in this world, and the fact is, judging people is not what I want to do, but like all humans I cannot avoid it. All I can do is try and live my life and treat everyone equally.

The Guidebook to man genotypes,

Or is it phenotypes.....I don't remember.

A while back I wrote what has become one of my favorite blog posts about women. It is also my most often praised post, with no fewer than 3....that's right three people saying they liked it. I have decided to go back to that well for my first post since being sick.

Remember, it has been a while, so be gentle as I feel my way back in to this.


Dudes.





This is a fairly easy to identify group of males. They smell like a mixture of booze, cologne, barf, and evil. They will mistreat you, no matter what gender you are. Their sole purpose in life is to be entertained, and sadly, at this stage in their development they are in fact only entertained by the shame and degradation of others. They will perform wild drunken acts of seeming bravery and daring if provoked. Note: Provoking merely means saying I double dare ya!.

They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be stopped. They will use you for fun and then throw you away.

This type of male is immensely proficient in sexual conquest as they are also generally the best looking of the male gender, in a narrow way.

Use extreme caution when approaching as they may in fact puke on you.


Boys.





This is the most deceptive form of male. They may be doctors, lawyerrs, writers, actors, firemen, etc. but they are actually still boys. For whatever reason, their growth as human beings has been stunted. They are stuck in grade 8.

These type of males find farts funny

These males have responsible jobs but forget where they left the car keys. They can perform open heart surgery but have no idea how to work a vacuum. They need you to baby them, not because they are meek, but because they just don't know how to be an adult.

Caution: Do not let this type of male get sick.....it is pathetic.


Brohs.




This is your typical guys guy. They are fit, they are in to sports, and they will help you move a couch. The most important thing to understand here is that they are just not that in to you. They are for the most part nice, and will treat you like a brother or sister, but they will not do anything else.

These males are fixated on just hanging out. They may play video games, they may want to have a beer, they may want to work on cars, but they do not want to hold your hand or talk about feelings...or really anything that doesn't have to do with rbi's or the infield fly rule.

Caution: There is a subset of this group called the dudebroh. The thing about the dudebroh is that they are dudes in broh clothing. They seem more mature, and are less drunk, but they still won't call you in the morning.


Gentlemen.





Polite, well mannered, and thoroughly corrupt, these are the males you see dressed to impress and heading to their power broker jobs. They seem perfect, mainly because they are holding up a facade. They have no remorse and they will not treat you as anything more than a means to an end.

These males tend towards the decadent, and I don't mean president's choice cookies.

Caution: Most of these males have a dark side. It may range from wanting you to dress up as wonderwoman and whip them to wanting to taste your entrails. You can never be too sure about their intentions because they mask them with fine howdayado's.


Men.





These are the most rare and elusive of males. They are average, everyday guys you see walking around, yet there is something special about them.

They are not perfect. They will leave the seat up. They will also apologize and try harder next time.

They sometimes laugh at the wrong time, but they always return to being serious when needed.

They are responsible, yet enjoy a nice beer.

These males will call you. They will not play games, and they will respect you in the morning.

They have reached a level of maturity that realizes life is too short to be serious all the time, and that life is worth living well.

You can count on these dude.

Caution: All other types of males will pretend to be this type to get you naked. You can tell the real from the fake by whether or not they are nice about it. There is also one other method of discernment. Men will never laugh at the misfortune of others. They just shake their heads, give a wry smile and say damn.




That's all I got for today. Not award winning, but hey, first time back in a long time, gotta start slow. When next we meet I will most likely be alienating millions of people and drawing a line in the sand.