Tagging that midnight train, hoping somebody benches it in Georgia. Even wrote “El Hijo del Jim Croce” because I was thinking about that “Walkin’ Back to Georgia” song he does. One time I rode the Greyhound from Colorado to Keysville, Virginia, which was ten miles from my mom’s house. The Greyhound still went to Keysville back then. A long ass ride, and I was squeezed next to an old woman as we went from Richmond down 360 through Amelia, and I felt close to home finally. We talked about it, and she said she could see the twinkle in my eyeballs. The bus stop in Keysville was what used to be a video store/restaurant/country store/pool hall combo building, that’s now split it up into some other barely not failing businesses more appropriate for today, but there was no pay phone there, even though pay phones were still a thing back then. I walked the mile from Keysville’s Greyhound drop-off to the gas station by the building supply store, because the gas station had a pay phone. I sang, “Walkin’ Back to Georgia” the whole way, and then kept singing it after using the pay phone to call my mom’s house and use the “state your name” request to say rapidly as fuck, “It’s Raven, just got home, at the gas station in Keysville, come get me,” so that collect call said, “You have a collect call from it’s-raven-just-got-home-at-the-gas-station-in-keysville-come-get-me, do you accept?” Everybody knew not to accept and just do what the message said, because that was also a thing back then. The building supply store is now one of those temperature controlled storage unit places, and I’ll never speak to my mom again while we’re both alive. But if you see that dirtgod moniker in Georgia, and it says “El Hijo del Jim Croce”, that’s all the stream of thought that went through my mind in the twenty seconds it took me to write that on an empty grain hopper. Every single moniker is like that, an entire world of philosophy and experience and reality and subjectivity boiled down to a bare essence that gets scribbled onto the side of a train, like a message in a bottle, knowing maybe nobody will ever notice it.
I
know spirituality is frowned upon in my generation, us being more inclined towards
jaded nihilism. But I’ve come to have faith in the concept of a creator as
whatever made the universe be the universe, with all its repeating patterns and
strange balance of positive and negative and how those things transcend
humanity or what man’s made. I never loved organized religion, but to be honest
I don’t love organized nothing, since all of it is organized by humans. Science
has claimed dominion over the Earth in more recent times, or at least tried,
but still seems to fuck up as much as it fixes. So I have quietly come to trust
how my heart always felt – that there’s something bigger than me, or my
species, or the Earth; and yet somehow it’s also smaller, at all times. Trust
in that helps a lot of situations not be as stressful, because honestly, none
of us control half the shit we think or hope we do. Even if we apply ourselves,
as militantly and humanely as possible, so much shit is beyond our control.
Science mistakenly seems to think it can correct the mistakes people have made,
and that the entirety of existence can be broken down and entirely understood.
I mean, I guess it can, but not by us. We don’t have it in us, and to think we
do is just more human vanity, it’s just we replaced perverted notions of god made
in our own image with perverted notions of a scientific process, entirely
brainstormed by only our brains, without consideration for the rest of
creation. Thus I don’t fuck with either, and believe in a creator as an entity
of energies which has a basic plan for everything, but also respects the power
of lounge, so that good things come around, and if you get yourself synced up
with the way of things, that reflects back on you. I won’t say it “benefits”
you necessarily, because there’s connotations with that word that don’t seem to
fit what happens. But I also know anytime I think I got shit all figured out,
something busts it up, so that I have to rethink everything to some extent.
That’s natural evolution, which is constant, and yet unseen.
I
had a volunteer vine climb up the front of my house, then the screen porch. It
had trouble grabbing the siding above the screen but eventually jumped its way
over. It tried to grab the screen door a couple times, so I had to tell it that
it was okay to grow everywhere else, to see what happens, but to stay off the
door. It’s mostly learned by now to do that, but it does like to drift a vine
that way to high five me on my way in and out. Turns out it was a star cucumber
vine, and it’s turned my entire front porch screen green on two sides – big beautiful
bright leaves that glow when the sun shines on that side of the house. I’ve
loved it, and I’m very thankful me and that star cucumber vine could come to a
mutual agreement about how to live together this past couple months. I think
about that relationship, and how many other relationships we ignore, or pretend
don’t exist, or that the other biological organisms have no say compared to us.
What a sad way to view the world, so dark and lonely and trapped inside the
human brain’s dark cave of unenlightened reality.
Money isn't everything. Economic liberation of some is not liberation of all. This should not be used an excuse to be a greedy ass in your own life, but it remains true. If we have to have it, it should be spread around. But it'd be better if we undid this bullshit, ultimately.
