Lights Outside

Stay out of the light. Keep your distance as if this were a bear that had no form. Ursus, which means destroyer – the shapeless, indescribable doom peoples would not name and called only bruin, the brown, the beast left untraceable, its edges incomprehensible. It assassinates inside the captivating hugeness of its body. Its shadow was sorrow, and there are many shadows here. Perhaps they are sure lights. Maybe you want to call them that and let all of that pale, wavering immateria spill over your face. Maybe.

There are some who would want the lights to be brighter, but they stay were they are, their intensity unmoved, unafflicted by your glowing emotions. The light shining around you, circumscribing your body reflecting on the surfaces in the center of everyone around you. These two come up together, dueling, charged and seconded, your glow by the perceptions of your heart and the light by the grid. The light wins out. It sorry, weak light remains ceaseless, inexhaustible, so long as its filamental gases hold out. It awards its prize, casting a pallor on the bare skin of a coughing chest waiting to come to rest forever. Pinpointing for us where weakness has developed.

Who knows, maybe it’s a paling in the end. Maybe it keeps us aware of what’s going to happen when we look at the bed. Giving us a chance, a moment or two more to adjust our senses instead of coming in here with some kind of unknowing, or at the outside worst, false hope. Perhaps they are sure lights outside room 317, knowing that they are at least honest.


The gidget below is my Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Team in Training fundraising widget. I am competing in the NYC Triathlon this year to raise money for LLS research and patient services charity. Last year a friend, classmate, and fellow writer, Honest Jon Harding, passed away after a long battle with cancer.

For every 10% of my goal that I raise, I will post a new story here or someplace else on the internet. If you want more fiction, or if you want to donate to this wonderful cause, just click below. This weeks story riffed off of this image at Elephant Words.

Update The Fundraising widget doesn't seem to be working right now, so until then, here is a link to my donations page. Anything you can give goes to a great cause, and all donations are tax deductible.

This Is Going to Hurt

but it is totally worth it.

Baggins

Just for the sake of saying, for the sake of expunging some pent up frustration and grief, I have to say for the foreseeable future, I will continue to refer to this strange and vocal movement for ostensibly smaller government and lower taxes as Teabaggers.



Mostly, my reasons are twofold personal grievances. The first is the abhorrent rendition of history the attempted adoption of the Tea-Party moniker represents. The Boston Tea Party was a movement by the American Colonials to foment support and demonstrate to the British Crown that taxation without representation, that unfair and excessive taxation which did not serve to redress the needs of local constituents, could not be quietly and demurely enacted. The current Teabagger movement claims to use that base as the springboard for their fervor, but their argument rings hollow. They have represenation, and the taxation they protest, on issues like health care and global warming, redress some of the gravest and most serious issues facing each and every American today.

The fact that most Americans have never, and will never, see a terrorist in their entire lives does not lead them to believe that the tax dollars spent on defense and military spending is going toward some fruitless cause, but most Americans are guaranteed to seek out medical coverage at some point in their lives, and anyone who lives through the next 30 years will certainly experience some effect of global warming due to our wasteful energy habits and dependence on archaic, unclean fuels.

My second reason for continuing to brand this group with the Teabagger moniker is due to the groups own use of language. Not so much the unfortunate self-referential signage that appeared early on, but the not-infrequent ridiculous, often-times slanderous, offensive, racist, misogynistic, homophobic and xenophobic comments made by Teabagger movement supporters.



This is a fairly tame example. While I am sure most of the people in this movement are not outwardly racist, or misogynistic, or so on, the amount of this kind of language, expressions of the most brutally racist sort directed at the duly elected President of the United States is at once ignorant, un-American, and worthy of the utmost contempt.

I do not expect America to be a perfect place, and there are certainly many areas in which this country can improve, but the utter LACK of response and denunciation by the wider elements of this movement to curb this kind of hate-mongering, to distance and disassociate from the troubling attitudes and beliefs hidden within itself is as great if not greater offense. This guy might not know any better, http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn312/Paul_H_Rosenberg/teapartypic.jpg, but Newt Gingrich, and Fox News, and the other leaders of this movement should. They remain silent, and therefore they remain Teabaggers.