Bizarro Land

“To be authentic, one must be willing to show their contradictions.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity and what it means to be authentic in everyday life.

The general definition of authentic is of undisputed origin; genuine. When applying this term to a person, I understand it to mean a person who is clear or transparent about where they are coming from, true to how they are thinking and feeling in the moment. A person who is honest about their contradictions.

In my psychotherapy practice the struggle to be authentic in relationships and at work is one of the topics that comes up most in my work with people. I work with many younger people who are resisting entering the workplace because they do not want to give up their authenticity.

It is my opinion that we are currently living in a culture which advocates for non-authenticity. We are expected to play a part, to not be authentic. If we are authentic, we worry about the harsh consequences that will occur. So many of our daily interactions seem to be built upon this unspoken expectation to not be authentic. If we are, we fear we will be harshly judged and even discarded. So, we hide who we really are and play along.

For whatever reason, authenticity has always been important to me. Maybe it is the residual effect of my more youthful punk rock values. I don’t like or respect myself if I am not being authentic and having respect for myself always trumps other people respecting me. At the end of the day I have to still live with me and if I am not practicing transparency in my life it is hard for me to like who I am. But still, it is often very challenging and even frightening to be authentic. Why? I have some ideas.

We all want to do what is right. We all want to be seen as being right and making the right decisions. We live in a culture that supports this idea that we should always do the right thing and be striving for perfection all the time. But the problem with this ideal is that it is impossible to achieve.

No one is consistent all the time. If there is a person out there who always makes the right decisions, always does the right thing, never messes up, is always on time and always says the right things and who has no contradictions– well then, good for them. But I doubt this person exists.

It is very difficult to be consistent all the time, in everything we do. There are often two parts to our brains; one part that always wants to do what is right for us (exercise, meditate, be kind, be honest, eat well, be organized, be on time) and another part of our brains that wants to do what is wrong for us (eat unhealthy, sleep too much, not do anything productive, skip exercising, skip meditating, watch mindless television shows, procrastinate, avoid and on and on).

It is very difficult for anyone to be as consistent as they want to be all the time. We often give into what is not best for us because of how we feel emotionally or physically. If we feel good it is easier to do what is right for us. But if we are not feeling well emotionally or physically it is much easier to neglect brushing our teeth or skip exercising.

The truth is that most likely everyone deals with an inability to be consistent. No one really discusses their contradictions, so this often goes unnoticed in our culture. But we all struggle to do what is right and best all the time. We all contradict ourselves much of the time, but yet we prefer to not talk about it.

Appearing to be this good and perfect person who has it all together is a false narrative that we have created as a society. This false narrative creates a constant and intense pressure in people to be always seen as perfect and doing the right thing. Especially in business. Authenticity is what gets lost as a result.

It seems difficult for people to admit their imperfections or contradictions out in public, since this stuff is not accepted by most. As a result people pretend, or play the role of having no contradictions within them. “I am not like that,” people often believe and as a result harshly judge those whose imperfections and contradictions show through. It is much easier to judge and discard others for their contradictions than it is to be transparent and authentic about our own.

Someone I know once called this “Bizarro Land.” A place where the norm has become everyone living their everyday lives where everything is seen as being great and perfect. A world where when a person’s imperfections show up they are harshly judged and even dropped. The problem with Bizarro Land is that it creates these standards of who you need to be that are so high, that we spend our entire lives (or at least until retirment) trying to achieve them. As a result we surrender our ability to feel authentic in our lives, because we are afraid of being seen as the contradictory person we really are.

The Man Who Discovered Happiness

The entire world knows of him. The most popular name since Einstein. It is miraculous how he could do what he did. All discoveries and inventions are minor in comparison, since he was able to make just about the entire world happy.

It didn’t take long either since once he announced his discoveries and traveled the world speaking about what he discovered, everyone’s brain lit up. The darkness was forever lifted. People got it.

The unifying thing about humans is not a single one does not want to be happy. The singular shared goal of all human life is happiness. We seek it out in so many different ways. It is what every human being aspires towards so once he was able to figure out how people could actually be happy all the time, it caught like a fire in a dry forest.

 

His name was Joe Ollman. Obviously he has been dead for some time now, but his discovery has still to this day changed the lives of everyone on planet earth. Even though we all live indoors now and are continually on-line, we have all found a happiness that is far greater than any kind of happiness experienced by humans who were off-line and went outdoors. Psychotherapy, psychiatry, life-coaches, self-help gurus, spiritual gurus, all of these professions are a thing of the past. No longer needed. In school I read about how many, many, many years ago, these were the most popular professions. They were everywhere and bookstores were filled with self-help and psychology books written by these people. Not any more. None of them exits today, since everyone is happy.

Joe Ollman. This is a name which will never be forgotten as long as humans are around. You can ask anyone, even children who Joe Ollman was and they will tell you the man who discovered happiness. And his discovery was not even that difficult. It is strange that authentic happiness eluded humans for so long. Joe Ollman just made it very easy for everyone to understand and implement it.

 

For those of you who are interested, Ollman’s Theory of Happiness is: To be happy is the absence of negative thought. Pretty simple, right? That as long as a person has negative thoughts they will not be able to be happy. In order to be happy a person must be able to eradicate all negative thinking. Sounds simple but not so easy. The genius of Joe Ollman was that he made it easy.

When Joe Ollman was alive he lived in a society that created deep unhappiness. The society that Ollman lived in was so dysfunctional that the vast majority of citizens had to take pills to make them feel better and more functional in what he called “The Sick Society.” Can you believe that? Society was at one time so dysfunctional and unhealthy that people had to take a pill, which generated more serotonin in their brain chemistry so that they could function better in that society. Even though it was over sixty years ago since things have really changed it still surprises me that this is how things once were.

People were continually worried about having enough money and what other people thought of them. People distracted themselves with things that caused them to feel even more empty inside. The routine and monotony in people’s lives caused them to live with this empty feeling inside, which drove them into states of deep anger and depression. Wow. Everyone was stressed out since surviving in The Sick Society caused a person to have to do a lot of things that they did not want to do. People had to pretend to be happy about working at jobs that they did not feel happy at. Everyone was disconnected from one another. No real relationships were able to be sustained in this harsh climate of anger, addiction, worry and depression. People pursued happiness but could never find it because their heads were filled with negative thoughts and people spent most of their time lost inside their heads. Fear prevented almost everyone from living the life that they wanted to really live. People were committing suicide and violent crimes everywhere. Men interested in power and money ran the world and the masses were much too afraid to rise up against the state. The people were powerless. They had no choice but to submit. It was pure madness. The only thing that could help this situation were psychiatric pills. It was the real Dark Age.

 

Joe Ollamn is a global hero because he is single-handedly responsible for bringing people out of these dark ages. He basically rescued everyone from the darkness and brought almost everyone out into the light. All with his very simple Theory Of Happiness. Joe Ollman was also once a very depressed and negative man. He admitted to often thinking about suicide and then he realized that there could be an alternative way. He did not have to physically die as much as he needed to psychologically change. Ollman realized that he needed to eradicate negative thoughts.

Ollman started practicing Mindfulness meditation intensively so that he could develop the awareness needed to know when he was starting to have negative thoughts and feelings. “When the emptiness and darkness was starting to creep in,” he often said. Once he was able to have this awareness he could catch it and turn the thoughts and feelings into something positive before the negativity snowballed into a miserable state. The importance of awareness in being a happy person was not discovered by Ollman but it was really brought into the mainstream by him. Today most people practice mindfulness meditation and it is because humans are much more aware that they are able to subvert negativity the moment it arises.

Ollman’s Theory Of Happiness stresses that if a person wants to be happy they must be able to not dwell in their heads. That dwelling or ruminating in thought is unhappiness. In order to avoid this a person must engage in distractions that allow them to feel engaged, focused and better about themselves when finished with the distractions. People just needed to become better able at choosing more quality distractions for themselves rather than just taking what is being offered by the highest bidder. It is because of Ollman’s discovery that Hollywood, Netflix, HBO, social media, cable television, most forms of advertising, Amazon Prime are now things of the past. Corporations that created and profited off of human misery are now gone! People now actually live quality lives. Who would have ever thought? All because of one man.

 

Ollman once said in a YouTube interview, “If human beings want to be happy they must be able to remain present and aware. It is so crucial that people are present and engaged in their lives in a carefree kind of way. If a person wants to be happy they must be carefree because if they are not stress and worry and depression will quickly rise up. The Sick Society did not allow people to be carefree. Everyone was worried and stressed out all the time and this is why unhappiness was such an epidemic. If people really want happiness it is so important that they are able to live in  a carefree way. Moment by moment, day by day without worrying about the future or thinking about the past. When a person is truly happy they are fully in the moment. They are fully content and engaged in the moment without a care in the world. The moment a person is no longer carefree, unhappiness sets in. The thing about humans is that we do have the ability to be carefree. We just need to exercise this ability or potential more regularly through mindfulness meditation practice.”

This was once of the most viewed videos in YouTube history and it is where Ollamn’s Theory of Happiness was presented to the world. Einstein wrote books and papers but it is interesting how things change. Ollman wrote no books or papers but presented his discoveries through YouTube videos. No one reads books anymore. Everyone just watches YouTube videos and Ollman was visionary enough to know that this would be the case one day. Ollman was such a genius and I am so grateful for his presence on planet earth. I do not know what the hell anyone would do without his Theory Of Happiness. We would all be taking pills and living in that dark and very sick society that almost caused Ollman to take his own life.

I am so happy the dark ages are now behind us.

*This is an essay written by a young girl for her online eighth grade Sociology class.

The Jaywalker

“Jaywalker!”

This is what my client shouted out her car window as she drove past me crossing the street. I was startled and almost dropped the black coffee I held in my hand and the cigarette I had in my mouth. Like a child caught doing something wrong but still trying to pretend like there is nothing wrong, I smiled and gave a friendly wave back at her as she drove away in her silver Tesla. I then returned to work.

I am the kind of person who crosses the street when and wherever I need to. I just cross. I do not like the idea of being told what to do by two painted lines on asphalt. Crossing in the crosswalk causes me to feel bad about myself. Like I am doing something that I know is not good for me. I often feel no different than a cow obediently following along.

I prefer to jaywalk and will explain why this illegal act is so important for mental health in a bit.

But first….

I didn’t think much more about it for the rest of the afternoon and got lost in trying to help my psychotherapy clients solve some of their unsolvable problems. The good thing about being a psychotherapist is that you can forget about your own problems for a while, pretend like you have none, and focus on someone else’s troubled inner world. I am often surprised when I come home from work and find several problems waiting for me. “Oh, hey,” I say. “I almost forgot about you.”

The following day, my client who caught me jaywalking did not show up for her appointment. Really? This was odd behavior since I had been working with her for over a year. She came to every appointment and would often say that her life depended on psychotherapy. She had no communication with any of her children and lived alone in a large and beautiful home. She was continually unhappy about her life and felt like psychotherapy helped her to work things out and become a better person in her mid-life. I sent her a text asking if she was still going to make it to our scheduled session but did not receive a response that day. Or the next.

I knew that my client had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder by a previous therapist, but I tried not to see her in the light of this diagnosis. Diagnosis helps no one is my general belief. I know that Borderline Personality Disorder causes a person to go from loving you to disliking and being angry with you at the snap of two fingers, but I wanted to believe that our therapeutic relationship was more stable than this. We would work through anything that came up, I told myself. We seemed to get along perfectly well but it is always tough to tell when a personality disorder is present in the room. When I did not receive any response from my text after a few days, I knew that something was wrong. It was obvious to me that she was condemning me for illegally crossing the street.

I realize that many people do not like the idea of being given advice from someone who walks outside of two lines painted on asphalt. A jaywalker has a negative connotation in our much too obedient, rule driven society. Everyone is expected to walk within the lines and those who do not are harshly judged. If I am a jaywalker what other rules do I break? I must be troubled person if I can’t even cross the street within the lines. What an irresponsible professional I must be. My client was a CEO of a large corporation and I knew that she deeply respects rules and expects everyone to follow them. Still I assumed that when she yelled out her Tesla window, “Jaywalker!” she was just playing around with me. A funny coincidence passing your therapist jaywalking in mid-afternoon on a crowded street. I did not realize that her yelling at me was actually an angry condemnation. How dare I illegally cross the street. I should know better. This sort of thing.

I realize that my brain has a tendency to jump towards the worst case scenario. I once had a meditation teacher who told me, “You have the kind of brain that when you walk down the street and you notice a rope in the middle of the street you immediately assume it is a snake. It takes you a few minutes to realize that it is just a rope.” Fair enough. I have done a lot of work to correct this psychological disability but being born and raised Jewish predestines a person to certain amount of self-created psychological duress, which is impossible to correct. The best a person can do is be aware of when their disability is causing them to experience the world in a way which is not true. A person who can’t do this is often called psychotic.

I don’t want to be psychotic. I want to know what I am doing when I do it.

It is possible that my client is not thinking what I think she is thinking. It is possible that not soon after passing me she was in a serious car accident and is now dead. It is odd that she suddenly stopped coming to our sessions and will not reply to my texts but as a person who works with so many people, it is not unusual for a few to every so often be suddenly and without notice recruited out of this life.

I was warned once by another psychotherapist to never work with people with Borderline Personality Disorder. “They will make your life miserable. At first you will think they are the nicest and most interesting people. They will tell you how much you are helping them and make you feel great about yourself. Then suddenly POW!!! When you do one thing that they think is wrong you will be punished.” I have never been very good at taking other people’s advice but now that I am left feeling like I was unfairly judged for jaywalking, I see what he meant.

I’ve had to keep in mind the words of the troubled philosopher Seneca who wrote in exile, “No man is despised by another unless he is first despised by himself.” I obviously have no problem with jaywalking. I enjoy jaywalking. It is my trivial way of saying fuck you to the law-abiding world. I would never want any kind of advice from someone who does not know how to walk outside of the lines. As our society becomes increasingly entrenched within narrow minded laws and mindless conformity, walking outside the lines has become a way to exercise one’s autonomy.

The person who is not continually exercising their autonomy is doomed to struggle with mental illness, often a fundamental symptom of conformity. Therefore, I see it as my responsibility as a mental health professional to jaywalk. It is impossible to conform and have mental health. Conformity to the way of life in our current society creates immense mental health problems. What use am I to my clients if I am unable to do what is best for my own mental health?

As I lay in bed last evening I was thinking that maybe it was the act of jaywalking with a cigarette in my mouth that turned my client against me. I realize that psychotherapists are supposed to be examples of responsibility and health and seeing me cross the street in an illegal way while smoking may have destroyed the illusion all professionals are publicly supposed to create. It is possible that my client could not tolerate seeing me as my authentic self. Maybe it is my fault for being caught with my guard down while out in public. I don’t really know. All this thinking is madness. This is the problem with having relationships with people with Borderline Personality Disorder. Suddenly you are left feeling like you have done something terribly wrong but you don’t know what. They are good at taking the madness that is in their brains and inserting it into yours.

Jaywalking is one of the final ways I have left to protest a society that is all about following rigid and suffocating rules. When I was young I would spend entire days in protest marches but now I do not have the time or energy to do this. I also live in an area where acts of political protest do not exist. So for now, jaywalking is the best I can do to convince myself that some degree of an activist rebel is still alive in me despite living a more professional, suburban, middle-class life. If my client doesn’t like it, to hell with her.

“You are better off without her,” my wife said to me as she sat in bed next to me and intuited that I was still trying to figure out what went wrong with my client. “You are right,” I said to my wife. We turned out the bedroom lights and I placed my arms around her and pulled her into my body. Before falling asleep I thought, I am better off without her. This is advice I am going to take. Just let it go.

 

The Jaywalker. Part One.

Interview With Randall Sokoloff (A Brief Excerpt) (Post #421)

The writer Marty Fletcher interviews the writer, blogger, artist and psychotherapist Randall Sokoloff. This interview will be published in our upcoming summer issue of WEDONTEXIST Magazine, which will be about the art of blogging.

Randall: Hello?

Interviewer: Hi Randall. Should we continue the interview now for thirty more minutes or so?

Randall: Sure. What was it you were saying last time we talked?

Interviewer: I’ve been reading your blog and other published writings for a long time now. I can’t seem to figure out what exactly you are doing but this interview is an attempt to make some sense of your writing. Is it one big lie you are constructing or are you actually telling this continuous, never-ending story with each piece that you write, like an open ended novel? I think of your writing as merging somewhere in between these two points, but I wanted to ask you, what are you doing?

Randall: With my writing?

Interviewer: Yes.

Randall: I like a quote from Stevenson about fiction: “The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.” So for me the meaning has nothing to do with what I write, the meaning of what I write is entirely in the distance from what is being written about.

Interviewer: So you are merging both method and meaning?

Randall: I suppose. Each story that I write is really just setting up the need for another story, so yes your statement about my writing as a kind of continuous and unfinished novel or literary project is correct.

Interviewer: The meaning of what you write is to be found in its distance from reality?

Randall: I think that fiction is realistic when it reminds readers that what they are reading is a complete lie. Getting readers to a point where they can accept the pleasure and excitement of the text they are reading as being just that and not a reflection of something else. In fiction meaning only exists in the experience of reading. Outside of the book or blog entry the story does not exist. The meaning is temporary, transitory, like all forms of meaning. It is the same when watching a film or listening to music. The meaning is transitory. The problem is when people try to extend the meaning of art into reality (the world).

Interviewer: What I like about certain stories or pieces of music is that they are not trying to offer up some kind of conclusion that you can take home with you. There is an infinite bundle of possibilities within the piece but ultimately it does not mean anything beyond the experience of reading or listening. Even though I feel like sometimes you are offering solutions in your work, I don’t feel like there are any conclusions. Just infinite possibilities.

Randall: I like that reading of my work. Thank you. For me, fiction is the only authentic terrain where anarchy is still possibility within a society that has become completely militarized and regulated. Within the context of fiction the writer has limitless possibilities. They can shape realities in whatever way they want. This is the exciting thing about blogging. There are no rules online. Do whatever you want! There is the freedom to create whatever meaning you want to create. Where else in life can a person do this?

Interviewer: This is why it so important to not accept any conclusion, even though it may look good.

Randall: Absolutely. In our current society, if you accept a conclusion, chances are you have accepted propaganda- not straight talk.

Interviewer: I feel like your work has something to do with a kind of resistance. Resistance to the status quo, to the society you find yourself living in. It seems like there is a kind of heroic struggle in your writing.

Randall: I don’t know about that. Sure there is a lot of resistance in my writing. Writing for me is an act of resistance against status quo. Ultimately, I’m trying to work through the problem of sincerity. I am attempting a kind of sincerity between what the story is about and what is being said. This is the interesting problem for me to try and work out in my writing.

Interviewer: Yes. The pleasure of reading your work, for me at least, is going on this journey as you try and work through the interesting problem you just spoke of. You are a terrific narrator and you make things happen on the page that I identify deeply with. Even if you are not understanding what may be going on there is still the pleasure of discovery when reading what you write. I feel like I get to join you on the path of discovery, that reaching into what you do not know yet.

Randall: Thank you. I like that and would like to say more about it. Do you mind if I go get a cup of coffee quickly and then you could call me back in say twenty minutes?

Interviewer: Sure. No problem. I could use some coffee myself.

Read more of this interview with Randall Sokoloff in the upcoming summer issue of WEDONTEXIST Magazine!

The Smilist

I have decided that my form of protest is smiling. I have always wanted to be more of a social activist but have just never been one to involve myself in large causes. I seem to stray away from any kind of cause that can not immediately have an effect on the thing I am trying to change. Maybe this is why I have always enjoyed protest as a solo act. Throughout my life I have done this in many ways- being a vegan, holding a protest sign on the side of a busy road day after day, spending my days reading novels, making art, spending the afternoon walking around when I should be working, turning American flags upside down and now I am smiling.

For the past few years I have been observing other people’s faces. I look at their faces while they walk down the street, sit at bus stops or drive their cars. One phenomenon that I have noticed is that the great majority of people have what look like grimace on their faces. The opposite of smiles. In the past year I have noticed that the sides of people’s lips have begun to droop even further downwards indicating a feeling of defeat and distress. Brows have become chronically furrowed and more and more people have wave-like distress lines on their foreheads. I began to feel that the smile was becoming in danger of extinction. As a result, one morning many weeks ago, I spent hours practicing my smile in my bathroom mirror. I also had unconsciously developed a chronic grimace and it was tiring to keep the sides of my lips and cheeks in an upright position. I had to retrain myself to smile by holding a smile for as long as I could and repeating the mantra “life is good” over and over. After a few days of practice I was able to keep a smile on my face all day long.

Every time that I leave my house I am actively smiling. I smile at whomever I pass by. I smile when I walk, talk and browse in the supermarket. I am making a conscious effort to look strangers in the eye and smile. Some people seem to appreciate this and reflect a shy smile back at me. Most other people seem to be put off by my smile and tell me this by looking the other way. I suppose unhappiness gets really comfortable after awhile and the sight of a person smiling at you may be too much to handle. I am compassionate about this so I do not take other people’s dismissiveness personally. What I do take personally is the people who seem to enjoy trying to wipe the smile right off my face.

There are always those few people who are so unhappy and miserable inside that they want the rest of the world to feel this way also. As a person who is making the conscious effort to save the smile from extinction I try to continue to smile at a person even when they are calling me “gay,” “idiot,” or any other derogatory term I have heard shouted my way. There have been a few men who have tried to physically attack me when I smiled at them- I assume this was because they are insecure in their own sexuality and assumed I was coming on to them. The other day I was run out of a record store because a large man with tattoos was threatening to cut my balls off because I was smiling at him. I admit, maybe I was partially to blame for this. The tattooed man looked so deeply angry that I had to smile at him a little bit longer than I should have.

I have heard it said that smiling is contagious but what I have found to be true is the opposite. Smiling can also be offensive. Maybe it is because we are living in a time where people are so stressed, over worked and worried about money that smiling represents a kind of mockery of the average Americans situation. People in America are really suffering at the moment and smiling as a result is not in fashion. I have found that to fit in you have to frown, or smile just a little bit. The person who decides to walk down a city street with a big smile on their face is considered to either be mentally ill or unstable in some sort of way. When I walk through the town where I live I am continually hearing names hurled at me from passing car windows. What I have heard most often as of late is “there is that smilist again.”

So be it.

Maybe I am the idiot but it is my belief that we create our reality from the inside out. There are things that happen to us that are beyond our control, but we do have control over how we choose to think about these experiences. If a person decides to shout a negative name at me, or be disrespectful towards me because I am smiling it is my choice whether or not I allow myself to get mad or just let it go and keep smiling. As far as I am concerned- if each individual does not take responsibility for his or her own inner well being, then the smile is doomed to become extinct. For now I will keep working to keep the smile alive. I will walk, drive, sleep with a smile on my face despite the danger that this seems to be putting me in. When others try to bring me down I will continue to smile. If they want to shout “smilist” from their car windows at me, then I will smile more. Please, if you can- join me and start smiling. Life is better this way.

Where The Hell Do All The Black Socks Go?

Over the months and years I began to notice the gradual decline of black socks. I would often notice that my sock drawer was filled with a dozen pair of nice black socks and as the months went by my collection of black socks dwindled. At a certain point during the year I would notice that I would only have one or two pairs of black socks left and then one day I would wonder silently to myself, where the hell do all the black socks go?

This recurring episode happened at least twenty times in my adult life. Ever since I started buying my own socks at the age of thirty-one, I noticed that there would be a gradual decline in the amount of black socks I owned. But I was young and self deprecating so I just assumed that the loss of black socks was my fault. I smoked a good amount of marijuana then, so I thought that I had misplaced my black socks when stoned. I also did my laundry at a laundry mat so it was more than possible that I was accidentally leaving my black socks behind in the dryer.

But as I began making more money, moved into an apartment with its own washer and dryer set and quit smoking marijuana I noticed that there was still this gradual decline in my black sock collection. But still I did not make much of it. I was thirty-four and preoccupied with that one lingering question that plagues most young men- what was I going to be when I grew up? As a result I had little time to worry about disappearing black socks. I would just go to Target, buy a $7.99 four pack of black dress socks and then get on with my life.

As my life became more domesticated and I found myself a married man, I started becoming more perplexed about where the hell all the black socks went. I was not yet at the stage where I was desperately searching for an answer but I was living with this question circulating around in my head. Since I was married and not making much money I was living on a budget. The budget was as tight as my pants had become. There was not enough money left over at the end of the month to go buy more black socks as I had done in the past. Now I had to learn to live with fewer pairs of black socks.

Every time I would sit down and put on my black socks I would wonder about them. Where the hell do you guys go? The mystery became too uncomfortable to carry around in my mind. I had to begin an official investigation. On the day I turned 40 I was getting dressed for my birthday dinner. I went to my sock drawer and noticed that there was only one black sock left. I had known for certain that only a few weeks ago I still had several pairs of black socks left. Now there was just one black sock. What the hell?

Dressed nicely for my birthday dinner I found myself inside of my dryer. A strange place to find oneself at 6:14 pm on their birthday, but I was driven by a irascible desire to solve the mystery. Enough was enough. First I looked inside of the washing machine. Nothing. Then I proceeded to climb into the dryer in search of some kind of explanation for the disappearance of all but one of my black socks. I was determined. As I moved around in the dryer looking for some clue, I accidentally turned the dryer carousel and ended up spinning upside down. I held myself in a manageable position by pressing both hands against the side of the dryer but my head was pressing into the metallic bumps of the carousel. I was in some pain and experienced some acid reflux. I did not know how to get out of this inverted position so I ended up kicking the top of the dryer in an attempt to turn myself right side up. But when I kicked the top of the dryer something broke. For a moment I became afraid that I would fall through some kind of dryer version of the rabbit hole and land in a massive pile of black socks. I envisioned my karma being that of a man forever trapped in a sea of all the worlds lost black socks. I panicked.

Fortunately my wife was able to hear loud thumping sounds coming from the laundry room and was smart enough to check out what was going on. When she found me inverted and stuck in the dryer she immediately began to laugh. What the hell are you doing? she asked me with an amused smile on her face. With her help I managed to stretch one leg over my stomach and head and onto the laundry room floor, turn my body right side up and climb out from the dryer. I did a kind of yoga like stretch that has left me with back pain until this day. I was trying to find out where the hell all my black socks went, I said once I had both feet on the ground, was standing straight and could breathe a sigh of relief.

At my 40th birthday dinner that evening I was wearing my one black sock and a borrowed gray sock from my wife. The sock was so small that I could feel it quietly ripping every time I moved my toes. It was obvious that I was preoccupied with something. People were asking me if anything was wrong. I then asked some of my male friends if they had the same problem with their black socks. I was surprised to find that they all had experienced the phenomena of disappearing black socks. Even the women at the table had noticed the same thing happening in their sock collection. We all tried to figure out where the hell the black socks go. There were so many possible explanations. They get left behind in the dryer, drop on the floor and get lost when we carry our laundry, etc. The only explanation that made any possible sense was that when we wash our clothes the black socks stick to the insides of our clothes and then when we wear those clothes out into the world the black socks fall out all over the place. But still I was not satisfied with this explanation. I mean if they fell out all over the place why would we not see them everywhere?

I became preoccupied with trying to figure out where all the black socks went. I did a lot of research on Google, but found no answers other than some Russian sock collector who offered a mystical explanation for disappearing black socks. I stopped purchasing black socks because I could no longer afford to lose them. My sock drawer became filled with red, brown and blue socks and over the months I noticed that none of them disappeared.

Then just yesterday I was on a walk. I often walk with my head down to avoid eye contact with passers-by. I also like to look at the ground moving under my feet. As I was walking I came upon a single black sock lying on the dirty sidewalk. I did not think much of it until a few minutes later when I happened upon another single black sock lying on the sidewalk. I was perplexed but I wrongly assumed that these black socks belonged to homeless people.

I continued to walk on and began noticing black sock after black sock after black sock lying on the sidewalk. What was going on? I lifted my head up and said out loud, what the hell? Where had all these black socks come from? I had walked this route at least three times a week and never noticed all these blacks socks before. Suddenly there were black socks EVERYWHERE. All over the sidewalks and in the streets. I stopped walking and looked  around. Cars were driving over the black socks and people walked past them as if they were not there. No one except myself seemed to notice all the discarded black socks all over the place. I let out a little giggle because finally I was seeing something that no one else saw. And then like all smart and logical married men on a budget, I proceeded to put aside my pride, bend over and start picking up and putting as many black socks as I could fit into my pockets.

Profile of a Young Rampage Shooter #2

“his conditioning is worsening and he is withdrawing further into himself. he is also struggling to articulate feelings which concerns us.” this is a part of a letter that a counselor at my school recently sent to my parents. fuck. “what is the problem son? school is a place where you have tons of support groups, it is a safe place, your teachers care for you and you are the most talented student in the tech club,” my mom said to me in response to the letter. what is she talking about? every teacher in that school is concerned about me. i feel like they are constantly on my back observing me. always giving me tasks to stay busy and telling me that they do this because I have special needs. special needs? are they fucking kidding? “you are given the best services to assure that you will be successful in high school,” one of the school psychologists likes to tell me. really? the best that the school has to offer is a bunch of unhappy, under paid and stressed out adults who can’t think for themselves and sound like robots when they talk about procedures and programs? and they want to turn me into a robot like them? are you kidding me. i do what they say because if I don’t I get into trouble. my parents take things away from me. the school gives me more work to do. i have to do what they say for now but they have no idea how much I hate them. i hate all of this but I cant let them see this or they will bury me in crap. but one day they will see it and then like the idiots they are they will wonder why.

the only place in the world that I have to myself is my room. it is the only place that I can feel like my shoulders are unburdened by the crap that adults put on them. i can do just about anything I want in my room. my mom and dad tell me that I spend toooo much time alone in my room. they tell me that I am going to get eye strain from staring into my computer too much. fuck them. they have no idea what I have to tolerate on a day to day basis. every day I go to school I am flooded with support groups, counselors and special needs programs. do they have any idea just how demeaning this is? do they have any idea the stress that it puts upon me to be put through this day in and day out? always something to do, always someone watching me the moment that I step outside my bedroom door making me feel like I am doing something wrong. and they wonder why I like to spend so much time alone in my room. my room is my sanctuary. in my room I am king and my computer is a universe where I call the shots. in my room I am not seen as a kid with special needs, I do not have to walk around with all these fucking labels adults stick on me. in my room I can be myself, do what I want and point my fuck you finger at the outside world.

recently my dad has been giving me shit about only wearing black. he likes to call me the boogie man or remind me that I will never get a job if I walk around like that. at school counselors ask me why I always wear all black. they have even asked my parents to stop buying me black clothes but if my parents do that I will refuse to wear anything at all. i like wearing black because it makes me feel like I can blend in. all other colors make me feel like I stand out and I don’t want to stand out any more than I already do. i already get enough shit and other colors would just bring me more problems. plus I love the color black. it expresses how I feel on the inside. when I wear black I feel like people fear me and stay away. like I am the grim reaper or something. i have heard some kids in my high school call me this. maybe I am. fuck them.

“friends, why don’t you have more friends?” my parents always wine. fuck friends. friends are a waste of time. i don’t like other people and other people don’t like me and I am fine with that. anyways the majority of kids my age are a bunch of sell outs. they do what the school and their parents say and never question anything. all the kids in my special needs group accept that they have special needs. they accept that they are the problem. they have been brainwashed by their teachers and parents. they don’t realize that the reason why they have special needs is because deep inside they are pissed off. they are pissed off by their parents who are pissed off at someone else. they are stressed out by a society that runs its citizens down to the bone. every where they go they are being forced to do things they do not want to do. they don’t have special needs because they are retarded, they have special needs because the entire society that has been erected around them is retarded and fucked up. but these kids are too brainwashed to see that the problem is not them. if any one should have special needs it is their parents, this is what got them into this situation in the first place: their parents special needs.

i know that I am young but I am not dumb enough to think that my condition is worsening. it is the condition of the american society that I live in that is worsening. it is my parents condition that is worsening. what the fuck do they expect from me, to be happy and outgoing when all around me the condition of adults is worsening? the economy is getting worse, the environment is getting worse, adults are over worked, there are more laws telling them what they have to do, it is more expensive than ever to survive and on and on. the condition that the world of adults have created is worsening and they don’t think that this is going to have an effect on us? what the fuck. open your eyes idiots. look at yourselves rather than blaming us. you wonder why the fuck I spend all my free time in my room, the world you adults have created is getting worse and worse by the day and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. i’m trying to escape people. but you blame everything on me. my behavior is my fault. i have a fucked up brain. go do dishes, clean up the yard. feed the dog, be a good little boy. you really want to make me believe that I am the one who has special needs and needs support groups? you really want me to believe that I am withdrawing further into myself? you really want me to believe that I have trouble articulating my feelings? read this motherfuckers, does it look like I have trouble articulating my feelings!!? fuck you adults and all you stupid fucking kids who have gone along with what adults tell you to do. just fuck you that is all I have to say to all of you. you have no idea what is really going on.

Profile of a Young Rampage Shooter

i’m so angry. this world is a prison from which I long to escape. all around me I see people being turned into zombie’s by the world of bills, money and jobs. i don’t want to become a zombie like what the world turns all adults into. it disgusts me. how could adults give up their freedom like that? how could they allow themselves to become so mediocre? this society is sick and people just go along with it. they follow the law, they do what the police say, they listen to their corrupt government, they allow corporations to make tons of money off them, they show up for work on time- they do exactly what they are told. i can’t stand it.

my parents are always so stressed out. they are always so angry. how the fuck do they expect me to be happier in my life, to do better in school if they are always so unhappy? every day my mother worries about stupid shit. every day she asks me questions about my day, “how are you doing?” “did you do your school work?” “you cant do this or that before all of your homework is done, you know this right?” “did you clean your room?” “why do you not put more effort into things?” “who do you think you are just sitting around while everyone else works?” “how do you expect to do anything with your life if all you do is day dream, play video games and surf the net?” it is constant questions like this all day long that make me hate her. i wish she would just shut the fuck up, leave me alone and get her own life in order rather than focusing on me so she does not have to focus on the fact that her husband is an abusive dick and she is stuck in an unhappy life.

my father is so obsessed with work and money that if he is not working he is stressed out from how much he has worked. america turns adults into pigeons scurrying around for any available crumbs. work, work, work and work more- it disgusts me. why are adults so afraid of being different, of not trying to appear like they have money and influence? my father is obsessed with his reputation. everyone thinks he is a nice and successful guy. people look up to him because he has a job where he makes a lot of money. he knows how to paint the picture of success and people love him for it. but at home he is a miserable dick. sometimes he hits his kids, he yells a lot, he is mean to my mother and he always expects us to do what he wants. it is like he takes of his mask and becomes the unhappy man he truly is deep down once he comes home. he is like one of those villains in the video games I play- on the outside he looks good but once you do not do what he wants you to do, or act like he wants you to act- he becomes filled with rage.

and they tell me I have a MENTAL ILLNESS. what the fuck!!?? i have a mental illness? you bastards should try growing up in a house like mine. try living under the same roof with my parents all the time and then going to a school where I am always told what to do, am on lock down and forced to do work I hate. try it mother fucker. you think you would not start to not give a fuck? you think you would not lose focus and concentration? you think you would not have little interest in following rules and doing your work? you think you would not become quiet and resigned? you think you would not do stupid things? you think you would not want to blow up the world? come on- you jerks can not tell me that I have a mental illness until you have lived in my shoes for a few days. i don’t have a fucking mental illness- I have fucked up parents and live in a society that stresses them out beyond belief. the problem is not in my head- it is in your head and in the institutions that all these ignorant adults have bought into. i am not the cause- I am just one of the many symptoms of the world adults have created.

and they want me to take medication? are you kidding? they need the medication. it is like taking an anti acid pill when you have just eaten a bunch of acidic food. STOP EATING THE ACIDIC FOOD AND THEN YOU WILL NOT NEED THE ANTI ACID PILL! these people are so fucked up. my school counselor and parents want me to take medication so that I can focus more, so that I can follow the rules more, so that I can be less depressed, so that I can be easier to control. yeah that is the quick fix- give me the drug, make the drug companies even richer and don’t bother looking at the root cause of what is wrong with me because what is wrong with me is YOU.

so you wonder why I hate this world. you wonder why I am so angry at everyone, especially all of the kids in my school who seem to blindly go along with what adults say. don’t they see how they are being manipulated, conformed and indoctrinated into the very system that is the problem in the first place (and how if they don’t go along with it they get put on mind numbing drugs!)? they are like undigested food for this fucked up society we have created. dont they realize that the adults who are the problem are the ones turning them into the conditioned drones just like the adults are? i cant stand watching this happen everyday. it disgust me. i have no respect for them. in video games we destroy anything that is a threat to our survival. we do it in an instant without any hard feelings because it is the right thing to do. it is what we have to do to free ourselves from the hell that is all around. it is how we get our honor back and restore harmony to our inner and outer world. why the hell should the “real” world be any different than the world of video games? the world of video games makes so much more fucking sense than the world that adults have made. in video games when there is a threat to my survival I am able to annihilate it. but in the real world when there is a threat to my survival I am put on medication and told I have a mental illness. what the fuck!!!

i am SO angry.

The Wedding Photographer

1.

I probably should keep this to myself but it is a story I have to tell. In order to assure that I do not offend this friend of mine who is the subject of my story, I will disguise his name and refer to him as Giovanni, or Gio (I have given him this name because it sounds similar to that of his favorite artist Caravaggio). If you, Giovanni, happen to read what I have written here, I hope you will understand that I worship at the altar of literature like you worship at the altar of photography. I must feed these literary spirits with stories that need to be told, just like you must take pictures. It would be a sin for me to remain silent.

2.

Giovanni is an artist whose medium is photography. He only takes photographs of his various body parts, which others and I have always thought to be a vain preoccupation. But like I said, he is an artist and some artists have vain predispositions. Unlike a lot of artists, Giovanni’s work has been published in various art magazines and he has had a few gallery shows in which he managed to sell a few things. However, Giovanni is still yet unable to escape from the ravages of that damming stereotype that haunts most artists- he is a starving artist. He starves more than any artist I know simply because he is fully committed to his craft and refuses to do anything else for pay.

At night Giovanni wonders the city streets with his camera under his arm like a gun that he will use to keep himself safe. He sits in bucolic cafes and writes in paper journals about his philosophy of art. He writes like a man who is writing a great philosophical treatise on the nature of the artist. From what I have read of his philosophy, I gather that Gio believes that the only thing an artist should pre-occupy him/herself with is the mystery of life. No television, movies, newspapers, books, friends, lovers or theatre should ever occupy more of an artist’s mind than the mystery of life itself. Since Gio feels as if he himself is the greatest mystery of all- “he himself” is his main subject. By pointing the lens of his camera upon his body, he is interrogating the nature of his material reality. He is asking the question, “What does it mean to be me?” and trying to make sense out of something that is impermanent (subject to the ravages of time) and unexplainable. This he believes is the ultimate purpose of his art.

This may also be the reason why he is poor. I try to explain to Giovanni that we are no longer living in Caravaggio’s time where an artist could be completely dedicated to his craft and still earn a meager living. We are aging men living in an age of technology, which demands that we learn how to compromise. Not many people are interested in buying photographs of an arm, foot, face, nipple, underarm, nose, eye, strand of hair, mouth and toe- I try to explain to him. However, he refuses to listen to reason. Gio is convinced that when he is long departed from this cruel world his work will greatly increase in value. “People will want a piece of me when I have crossed over into that other realm from which no one ever comes back,” he often explains. For now, Gio believes that living for his art is more meaningful than earning a living doing something he does not really want to do. But I understand that survival in our modern world costs money- so as a concerned friend, I was able to connect Giovanni with a gig as a wedding photographer.

3.

The wedding was a good opportunity for Gio to make a few extra dollars, $375 to be exact. I knew that he desperately needed the money to pay his rent, buy some food and get a creditor off his back. I was also hopeful that this one gig as a wedding photographer could lean Giovanni towards other opportunities in the profession.

Instead, this may have been the final gig that Giovanni will ever get as a wedding photographer. Giovanni not only failed to get dressed up for the wedding (he wore a black t-shirt with a Salvador Dali print on it of three naked women dangling above a table) but he also managed to take photos of only himself during the entire wedding. He snapped photos of himself besides the bride and groom, besides various guests, in front of the Torah and with the Rabi (it was a Jewish wedding). He even took photographs of himself wearing nothing but his boxer shorts in the bathroom. At one point towards the end of the celebration, the bride’s father caught on to what Giovanni was doing. He approached Gio and pointed out that Giovanni was taking photographs of himself. The father of the bride became enraged and Gio yelled back, “I am a true artist and I do not compromise my artistic vision for anyone!”  There was a few seconds of silence between them. The father of the bride was confused and caught off guard by Giovanni’s strange response. “But you have been hired as a wedding photographer?” the father replied. “Well then, I quit!” Gio screamed and walked out.

“How could you put me in such a situation?” was what I heard Giovanni drunkenly repeating on my answering machine later that evening. I knew something went terrible wrong. When I called him back he was drunk and enraged. I explained that I was only trying to help him out. “You have humiliated me not helped me! How could you? You know that I am an artist…. not a fucking wedding photographer!” Gio yelled. He repeated the word artist several times. “Okay Gio, but you need to eat, pay your rent and we live in a time that even the artist has to martyr themselves if they want to remain alive.” Giovanni then hung up on me.

4.

I have probably made the mistake of making this too personal already. If I were absolutely certain that Giovanni would never read what I have written here I would tell you more. Some things are so sacred that not even the sword of a writer’s pen should offer these pieces of information up to the altar of literature. Like my grandmother often said in response to my constant need to say too much about myself, “some things are better left unsaid, my little babushka.” I will tell you this- I have not seen Giovanni in over three months and we have not spoken since that belligerent phone call. I have heard from a mutual friend that Giovanni no longer wants to speak with me. He is locked away in his studio, taking continuous pictures of himself, which he tapes all over his brick walls. He has only been seen in public once, and at that time I am told he looked frighteningly pale and thin. Even though I have written here about one man’s private madness, there is no question in my mind that Giovanni is right about one thing. Years after Gio is dead his photos will be studied by art historians, shown in galleries around the world and collected by the rich (such is the absurd nature of the world in which we live). It is my hope, that at this future time, what I have written here will be of some help.

The Counterfeiter

I know a man who wears fake clothes.  Well, the clothes are not fake because the cheap material is real, but the labels that the clothes hide behind are as a fake as the plastic flowers that sit on my desk. For almost a year I have been meeting this man for lunch and I had always been very impressed by his nice clothes. He often appeared to just walk right out from the pages of a fashion magazine. A few times when I glanced at the label on his clothes, sunglasses or hand bang I was surprised to see such exclusive names such as Dolce and Gabbana, Versace and Prada. “What is this man who works as a Waiter doing wearing such expensive clothes?” I always wondered. I never asked him this question, because as it turns out, I did not have to.

Not to long ago, one afternoon in the middle of our lunch together- this man confessed to me that he was a fake (for the sake of maintaining this man’s privacy I hope readers will not mind me referring to him as this man. I think we are all entitled to our privacy no matter how much the things we do and say deserve a wider audience). When we first met for lunch that day, I noticed that he was not looking good at all. His black shirt was not tucked in and his gray suit jacket was wrinkled. The hair on his head seemed to be out of line and the bruised bags under his eyes collected the water from the previous days rain. “I am a fake….I want you to know this,” he said in a serious tone while putting the noodles from the chicken soup into his mouth. “Everything on me….is completely….fake….it is time I come clean.”

I was surprised by his confession but not entirely clueless. I had read an article a few weeks before about how people who make certain choices that hide the truth can often feel like fakes. The article went on to describe the detrimental psychological repercussions of knowing that you are fake and explained how easy it was for a person to fool others but how impossible it is to fool yourself. After I read this article I did not think about it again until the afternoon that this man sat in front of me eating chicken noodle soup and confessing to me his fraud.

“Prada, Armani, Zegna, Gucci, John Varvatos, Dolce and Gabbana, Versace….I dream these names….I hang pictures of the clothes on my wall….spend hours loitering in the finest department stores…..I try the clothes on and weep….they look so good on me….they feel like a million dollars….but I cannot afford them….the fact that I cannot afford the man I want to be kills me…. keeps me up at night….I spend hours wondering up ways to steal the clothes….ways to make quick cash and buy them….but these are all just dreams….so I travel into the tenderloin….go to a little shop that sells the next best thing….all this stuff is fake…. my $65 Armani suit….these fucking $10 Prada glasses….my $18.99 Versace shoes….and the fucking $1.00 special Gucci socks…. all of it is fucking fake….I can not take it anymore!”

Now I had the answer to my question and it all made sense. As this forty year-old Waiter dressed in fake designer clothes sat in front of me with tears running down his face and noodles coming out of the side of his mouth all I could do was think about myself. I thought about my own preoccupation with clothes. I had always liked to dress nice and I remembered that as a child I often dreamed about growing into a man who wore fine suits everyday. As I got older this dream seemed to fade away and I became content wearing t-shirts and jeans. Sometimes I shop at Banana Republic because I like how the clothes fit me, but if I do not have the money to go clothes shopping I will happily go many years without even buying a pair of socks. I had never thought that deep down it could be a source of repressed sadness for me that midway through my life I am not able to afford any sort of designer clothes. I have done a good job convincing myself that I do not need these things- but as this man sat in front of me confessing his counterfeiting ways, I could help but see a part of myself in him.

“I have the entire world fooled,” he lamented on. “Everyone wonders how I can afford such expensive clothes….on a Waiters salary….they think I come from a wealthy family….am independently wealthy…. this makes me feel like less of a victim or failure….it gives me a sense of power and pride….knowing that other people think I can afford the most expensive labels around….but I know….I know….that these clothes are fake….even though others might be impressed….I cannot make myself believe….that these clothes are real!!!!no matter how hard I try to convince myself….I shiver every time I pass by a department store window with an Armani or John Varvatos display….or when I notice a person who is wearing the real thing….I feel like a complete….such a complete looser.”

He was talking so loud that some eyes in the restaurant looked over our way. My eyes also looked around the restaurant and wondered how many of these nicely dressed people were wearing fake things? How many of them look good on the outside but are feeling fake and uncomfortable on the inside? Even though this man sitting in front of me has tears running down his face- how many of these people have tears running down their souls? I tried to offer some advice, to be of help to this man but I found that I had little to say that could repair his soul. “It is okay Randall….you do not have to give me advice….I just needed to tell the truth to someone….this is all the help I need.”

A month passed before I saw this man again. I thought about him almost everyday and since his confession I had not been able to stop noticing other people wearing designer labels and wondering how many of them were fake. We met for lunch at our regular place but this time something was different. This man was dressed in “normal” clothes. A plain t-shirt, jeans and converse shoes. I was surprised. “I just got rid of them all….every fake label I owned….ended up in the trash,” he told me with a confidence within his words that I had not heard before. “It is much easier just being me….no matter how much I wish…. I was someone else,” he said. I could relate and told him that I understood. “Knowing that I was a fake….a counterfeit….ate away at my soul….even though now I know….I may not look as good….or successful….or stylish….I feel like I have been set free.” I felt glad for this man even though when he crossed his legs I noticed a Gucci symbol on his green socks. He had found a happy ending for himself and seemed to come to terms with who he really was. We had a nice lunch that afternoon and as we were leaving he put on a pair of sunglasses that I noticed had a Versace label on the side of them. “Hey, what is with the glasses?” I asked him, knowing full well that they were a fake. “These my friend….are the real thing,” he replied with what looked like a sinister smile and we walked out into the light of day.

The Storyteller

The difficult thing about being a Storyteller is finding the time to write. In our post industrial technocratic society man, woman and child are subjected to a fate similar to the wrath of God against Adam and Eve. We must work by the sweat of our brow, labor away all of our vital energy so that we can afford to maintain a semblance of dignity and pride. It is an unusual condition to be wedged between because most have become so habituated to this way of being (working) that they see no alternative. They have learned to love the hand that enslaves them and decry a life without hard work ( a classic case of conditioning). After all we know that the majority of hard workers are working hard only so that they do not have to be left with the time to take a deep look into themselves. They find their identity within their work because what is deep within them is devoid of substance. This is a catch 22 situation. You work hard and you loose your self but without hard work you loose your house. This is the great modern modern dilema- how to find the time to live your life.

Since, I have been working full time as a Teacher I have found little time to write. I long for the days when I posted upon my blog every day and read with great anticipation the comments that followed in return. I was telling my stories and people around the world were responding to what was told. As a Storyteller who has been burdened with the naging desire to write, tell stories and be heard (psychologists tell me this is because my parents did not listen or pay attention to me)- the outlet of a blog has been heaven sent. But now because of the curse of “working by the sweat of our brow”, I have had to labor away all of the hours of my day and night educating young minds about how to avoid getting stuck in this consuming rat race. We talk about ways to make a fortune before the age of twenty so that they can buy an island and live far away from this synthetic life-denying culture that us humanoids have created. We find critical solutions for problems of “work-addiction” and plan strategies for ways that I can escape from this society and join a race of people who live more in harmony with life rather than the preoccupation of working.

You may wonder how this has anything to do with being a Storyteller, and I would respond that it has everything to do with being a Storyteller. In societies that are consumed with progress and work the first species to become exiled our expendable are the Storytellers. The workers or citizens of these corporate republics do not want to be reminded of their servitude, their complete dependency upon forces outside of themselves. This is why Plato exiled poets from his Republic. “The poets will allow the people to see the many ways that the established government must manipulate the citizens into the cave and away from the light of humanity,” he said. This is what the Storyteller does- he/she makes people more human.

But I no longer have the time to write or spin stories in my head. I have been drinking more and sleeping less. All of my usual creative outlets have been plugged up by work. Time seems to have shortened. By the time I am ready to read and write my eyes refuse to remain open and willing to follow the words which exhaustion has caused me to read and write backwards. This is the world that I have found myself within, and yes it is the very dynamic that seeks to exile the Storyteller from the very body it resides within. Sometimes late at night when I am lying in bed, I can feel my body shaking and becoming tense. I grow restless and have difficulty staying still. It takes me hours to fall asleep and I know that these systemic sensations are the result of my inner Storyteller trying to escape from my body so that it can go some place else where it will have the peace, light and time to tell its many tales.

The End.