By the time I was thirty I had stripped nearly all artificiality and humanity from my consciousness, although I understood underneath still lay the quick sand muck of socialization and instinct. I thought that would be okay, after all, residue, rust, and dust is the natural order of all physics.

By the time I was thirty I had stripped nearly all artificiality and humanity from my consciousness, although I understood underneath still lay a quicksand muck of socialization and instinct. I thought that would be okay, after all, residue, rust, and dust is the natural order of all physics. I remembered my first real girlfriend and I talking one day about what we wanted to be or have when we reached thirty. I don’t know why thirty was important, but I guess that was about how far along in life we could think of ourselves before we started getting old. She wanted to be a millionaire and I wanted to be a doctor or a saint. I have to laugh at that now, imagining what it would have taken to be either one. She was smarter, money was a simple object to gain some happiness out of life. She didn’t care how she got it or where it came from, from her own creativity or by just being pretty and available. I had plenty of conversations with god, or Jesus, and maybe, as I discovered later, a little misogyny probably prevented me from conversing with the Blessed Virgin Mary, maybe out of shyness, thinking how complicated it could be, being a virgin and a mother, with god as the father. Still, those were the good old days. Nostalgia can be nourishing at times. That’s one realization I’ve come to, the Principle of Lasting Peace, from which Nostalgia is derived. You might not see that now, but you will a little further on. 

Anyway, she did become a millionaire and I didn’t even make it to Australia, which was the second thing we both wanted to do in our lifetimes. I went a lot of other places but not there. There is an indigenous culture there that is one of the homeliest people in the world. Yes, that’s just my standard of a certain kind of beauty, but I’m pretty inclusive when it comes to accepting most of the six billion people on this earth of ours. I really love humanity and all it has to offer in such a basic way but, once I get down to what they’re all about, the bad far outweighs, or should I say, dominates the good. Like I was saying, by thirty I had accepted that fact. I didn’t relish that because deep down in that residue I mentioned before, there is a semblance of belief that there is always a chance humanity could find its balance between being suckers for the godhead and the philosophy, “money talks and bullshit walks.” I suppose that’s Hope. Hope is the belief that in every truth, there can be found, if one looks hard enough, a kernel of optimism among the many dire warnings that life produces. In fact truth itself is inherently a realization that for every action there is a reaction, truth or consequences, right and wrong, a contradiction. Or wrong time, right place or vice versa. Sent from my iPad