I woke up one morning and all my tomorrows were my yesterdays. I could see bad days coming and avoid the days that I didn't want to live through. Yet, every day I didn't want to live through, I flew back instead into a random day in the past—not my past, but the planet's past. I guess in this way I paid for avoiding living through the days I chose not to endure. Such a riot of days, they were. Some were simple, like being a female servant tending fires all day in the manor house, conjuring up of chimneys of fragrant wood smoke, fiery emerald log ghosts releasing heat, overheard conversations I wasn't meant to hear, kitchen smells creeping through the halls like phantoms, the mackerel breath of the propositioning footman, the puffing umbrella dress of ‘me lady’ hiding her legs so that she seemed to move as if gliding across ice, so graceful in her bound-up corsets, accepting her sad fate as a royal puppet meant solely to inspire lust. On another day, the boom of a cannon transformed me into a wretched deckhand on a cargo ship being attacked by pirates. I could see the men spitting on their musket balls for luck as they loaded them into rifle barrels, fear making them miss the opening, the ship alive with pirate terror, and the holy, oblivious billowing of the sails, cannonballs splintering wood, the first mate kneeling, wounded, praying up into the sky, my own sword fearfully slashing, swiping at everything, the sickly sweet blood smell, cutting my own boat mates as well as mast lines till finally a looming pirate ended my pathetic spasm of resistance and I floated like a jellyfish above the battle, then disappeared peacefully into another realm. As I repeatedly evaded my tomorrows, I wandered the past absorbing the poison of the conquerors and injecting myself with their beliefs, till I, too, was poisoned. It seemed all of them were so rigorously opposed to natural human joy and peace and would do anything they could to suffocate it. Surprisingly, those accustomed to not believing in the validity of their own thoughts readily endorsed their own suffocation and rallied around the ragged newspaper truths, pointing fingers in accusation, worshipping in temples of xenophobia, fear—flight—fight—loss, wrapped in morose silence, too dried out to weep, always sporting a stiff, upper lip, again and again. Where were the owls of wisdom? Why does the same thing occur over and over again? Why do we deny our past and expect the future to be different? Why do we so easily sell ourselves out? Why does some part of us secretly enjoy our own pain? Is some part of our mind wired for doom? For glee in panic? For surrender to lions? For distrust in our own innate wisdom? One thing I realized wandering the past and reading ancient scripts and scrolls was how much smarter the educated were than modern people are. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but go back and investigate it for yourself. We are dazed and stupefied by the endless access to information but little of it sticks. The ancient ones relentlessly studied the hard-won knowledge as if it were a miracle and wrote it down by hand with the honorable intent of passing it on to future generations. They were the first Google without the evil. Did I say evil? One man’s evil is another man’s marketing plan. We have access to everything, yet everything has access to us. Do they honor this access? Are we all just social ME!-dia monkeys chattering our freedoms away? They own the trees. We have become the new banana crop. At least the stickiness of the Internet was honestly named: Website. Dragonflies, Beware . . . . .
1 Comment
Mary
11/4/2014 06:09:20 am
Love the first google concept. Even the things they built lasted longer really incredible we cannot even duplicate today. Really did use our creative mind more now information overload holds us back and captures us like a web! Interesting reading
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