I couldn’t have said it better.

I fell asleep in my wireless Sennheisers, drifting in and out between a collection  of Debussy and Mozart. I woke to the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488) and made the subtle  and barely cognizant observation that the movement is in F sharp minor. I do believe, although I might be wrong, that no other Mozart piece shares this attribute. My absolute pitch is a wasted skill; I can’t compose or write music. I vaguely remember caring…

What fantasies we entertain as children,  from the repressed trauma of the birthing process, we hit the ground screaming. We die screaming, most of us without ever having lived a single moment of realization of a confirmed dream. Those with the unfortunate gift of introspective insight carry the heaviest burden, gaining an disproportionate amount of imagination in our usually short lives, succumbing to some combination of risk related accident or over-stimulated mental nausea resulting in a DSM diagnosis that seems to correlate with the destruction of higher faculties on cue. We dreamers, we suffer. Not in the emo-sense. Not in the alcoholic sense (although it can help). In the same sense that reality seems to ignore the most uncreative of us in the species. Truth is easy and unkind. You are not wise for informing someone of the truth. You must somehow guard it, as it were something mystical, beyond us, magical and overwhelmingly pleasant… Dreamers suffer because we see what is not. It is a life of information overload and the equivalent to thousands of writer’s blocks associated and entangled in everyday activities. Too much things to say, too little time to say them.

And writing them is not fast enough. How the greats were able to put to pen their thoughts is beyond me… Typing as fast as I do is not enough. In this what can I offer but the monumental conclusion to the last 26 years of my life… and I can sneeze the “so far”.  The truth. Ha. Sure.

Most of you know damn well there isn’t someone talking to you and listening to your pleas for help and prayers for answers. Another issue. Another concern. Do you speak to yourself? Can you turn it inward? Have you tried?

Try it. Go a single day without lying to yourself. Wake up an hour early and ignore the mirror. Go to a coffee shop that you’ve never been before and drink the house black.

The world spins in us, as if we were looking in a giant circle. We can’t spin fast enough. We can’t swim forever. Our battle is with ourselves, with the balance of despair and the ignorance of our not-so-noticeable failures. I say embrace them. I would take the extra time in the morning and preview my life just a bit longer. I have forgotten today to be thankful.

Nothing wrong nothing right. I love it, imagine I could lie to myself finally… right at the end… what would I lie about?

Life is an abattoir of hopes. Is it worth it? Fuck yea.

cuz I like to be gone most of the time
and you like to be home most of the time
if I stay in one place I lose my mind

The beautiful thing about being atheist is the equal opportunity torture reserved for us in the afterlife. Sir Edmund Hillary, rather, I should just call him Edmund Hillary, as he would have preferred not to have been knighted, was simply another great human who now enjoys the endless discomfort of a torturous afterlife of whichever conflicting ideology happens to be true.

I sometimes wonder about it myself, having long ago been freed of the burden such a demonstrably evil concept held over me, it is a curiosity to me how normal people still believe wholeheartedly in myths of our ancestors to such a degree.

Hell, the concept, the word, is a weapon. Its power magnified by the intellect. No lay clergy could envision the hell of my nightmares, or the hell of Vonnegut’s nightmares, as the potential revelations of Einstein brings me to shudder… I may not be half as intelligent, but I understand enough. Hell is a mental ball of fire that feeds off of imagination. The least imaginable, the religious among us, fail to fully grasp the meaning of their construct, their greatest achievement, through mental anguish and torture, the servitude of man’s mind.

I will be joining Einstein, Vonnegut, Asimov, Hillary, Ingersoll, Russell, and the likes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson in whatever hell turns out to be the correct one. In fact, I can’t think of a single mentor of mine, a single hero from the past, Winston Churchill included, who won’t greet me at the gates of the one true hell.

Perhaps a real god is much smarter than those he allows to talk for himself/herself… suppose maybe, these people are the one’s who, in their stubborn rejection of false reality, actually obtain the greatest in love and respect from the creator…

Imagine, a God who creates the Universe, who then, after so many failed attempts to create a unique, autonomous creation, fully endowed with free-thought and a rational mind, creates humans. In the creation, he makes the entire world, so obviously devoid of any evidence of his existence, that the only truth that can be obtained by his creations is his lack of existence. As he observes, completely and utterly removed from their lives, he waits patiently for those who have honored him the greatest with their pursuit of knowledge, their love of the minds of men, the pursuit of justice and fairness and all that is truly good, the kind of good that fires all the right chemicals to create that warm glow… These people, at the end of nights, will be rewarded with the revelation of the creator’s true existence, and an opportunity to continue that pursuit to the moment of full satiation and satisfaction, to end the journey of life, with the final knowledge of all things…

That would be bliss. That would be heaven. This creator, this benevolent awesome power, is too wise, and too loving, and too careful to allow any sort of eternal punishment for his creation. The chance for life was an unrequested reward. The pursuit of knowledge, pursuit of all that there is to know would be the greatest gift his creation could give to him, and in response, these people would be rewarded with that which they seek. The only “punishment” that would exist would be the missed opportunity. The millions upon millions of people who go their whole lives getting others to regret theirs, and seeking an easy mental state, the worship of a god whose existence is hidden completely from them…

Throughout time, the free-thinkers and pursuers of knowledge are the only unmistakable mark of a creator. The only proof, in all of time, of the existence of any intelligent force, whatsoever, is the existence of those that don’t believe. As if, the Creator himself, intended that to be the truth, in order to find those most desiring the gift of this undeserved reward this short existence.

I’ve been bitching to my buddy Micah (Like, actually whining, I don’t know why he puts up with me sometimes) for the past few months about the abuse of the Middletown Police Department and the local government. I’ve avoided local politics, and for the most part, been keeping my nose clean with any local activism. I’m accustomed to being pulled over for one thing or another, in my mind usually for my “controversial” car decals (Two Darwin Fish…). Here, I’ve been pulled over twice for a “random” check. I’ve been asked in malls to remove my hands from my sweater, and I’ve had my keys confiscated by a police officer for not having my Environmental decal displayed, who then proceeded to lie to me about the suspension of my registration. I had to attend a Tribunal to argue in front of the judge that the suspension of my registration was against the law, seeing as I didn’t break a law. I wrote a lengthy and well written complaint to internal affairs about the whole ordeal, to which the local Middletown Police refused to acknowledge. I brought the issue with the local government, with no proper confirmation or acknowledgment that my complaints reached the right sources. Meantime, the cops are all driving brand new Dodge Chargers.

From Micah:

“Providence AP. Middletown School District. Wow. We are famous as privacy abusers. You are right Dane (Savor that, by the way), Middletown is fast becoming a police state.”

Scrolling across Faux News the last few nights has been the headline that here in Middletown, RI, our lovely local government and school board will place electronic tracking devices in Elementary School Students to test better communications between teachers and parents with students.

Ironic. I happen to be in the right place at the right time. This was actually my elementary school in the short time I lived here, almost 20 years ago. There is still a time capsule in the playground from my Kindergarten class, I’m sure, long forgotten.

No, it’s really not funny. The big guns (ACLU) are coming in for this one, and coupled with national attention, it won’t be an issue for too long. This has been Micah’s home for a lot longer than mine. We both have come to a fairly solid middle-ground, myself leaving behind the fetters of a Big Government economy, and Micah leaving behind the detritus of Big Government social values. Perhaps we should consider running for local government, if anything, to protect our neighbors and friends from abuse of the system, something that is clearly necessary.

As an epsilon of the “We”, noted as the first word of the preamble of the Constitution of the United States, my opinion on certain matters is relatively worthless. You should be aware that this of course has no bearing on my desire to spread my opinion, which I deem mildly superior to most. Undoubtedly, this will leave some to declare a nimiety of arrogance, for which I have no real rebuttal, save my disclaimer that I am always willing to change my mind when confronted with arguments coupled in deep intuition, operating within abstraction of concepts logically constructed. You can find me most often clashing with the shrinking “…pool of well-informed, clear-thinking Americans…” as the ever orotund Bill O’Reilly calls them, the clear contrast to academic professionals, scientists, writers, journalists, teachers, and the leaders in arts and entertainment. Indeed.

In the early dystopian literature of post 1905 we were introduced to the idea of totalitarian states, from Yevgeny Zamyain’s novel We (coincidental relation to the previous pronoun), Animal Farm , Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano. In these novels the idea of socialism is brought to bear on the consequences of lost individualism. The industrial statehoods that rule the lives of people reflect the conformity, unity, and stability wrought from the stagnation of rational men and women. The endless message of devaluation, of depravity undefined, a common enemy built from the masses, and collective fears forged by the power of mass media, control better than any removed power or government ever could hope to dream. When the message is imposed, by mental coercion, and the threat of physical coercion, it is as uncontrollable as the fires of a tire yard. The message hides itself among the detritus of cleverly forged words and meanings. Associations are abstractions, and concepts are abused. Like liberalism turned suddenly, in the span of twenty years to an evil word, and conservatism, the concept of conservation and preservation of values, suddenly means the power to repel change, and stagnate progress, so has liberty, the most important word ever created by humanity, fallen to destruction of imposed definitions and meaning. Liberty is the “freedom” to obey. Liberty is the signing of your life over to someone or something else. Liberty is obeying the marching orders of dead men and dead concepts, defined and instructed by living “medians” as links between the two. The words that are missing from the intent are shockingly apparent, like exposed women in a sea of soldiers. We, the “links” are the only ones who understand the “real” meaning of the Constitution. We, the self-defined “leaders” are the only ones who understand and speak the “real” meaning of God’s word. Absolute ideals forged in stone, translated by fools, packaged to idiots.

And on target, Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee delivers a sermon of servitude:

“When you give yourself to Christ, some relationships have to go,” he said. “It’s no longer your life; you’ve signed it over.”

Likening service to God to service in the military, Huckabee said “there is suffering in the conditioning for battle” and “you obey the orders.”

I’ll simply and unequivocally not stand for it. I’ll not be told what my life means to me, or what I will do with it. This is beyond my restive spirit, beyond my own frustration at the forces of irrational thought. This is a man who understands the closing gaps, and means to choke the last vestals of sanity from our once proud Republic. This isn’t just a call for a theocracy, a tyranny, a totalitarian statehood. It is the call, as it has always been, for the end of dissent and free-thought. The values of the our society are seeped in the essence of true liberty, of free-thought, of true freedom, and the very real thirst for knowledge and desires and passions of the minds of men. Beware always the disclaimer on liberty, the prepositions. Men and women who desire such freedom from tyranny will inevitably rebel against any definition of freedom that contains the words “always”, “must”, “for”, “from” and “through”.

Freedom is you. It is YOUR ability to establish YOUR values, with the respect and acceptance of OTHER’S values.

If we cannot define freedom, we must recognize what it is not:

Freedom must not include _______
Freedom is only from _______
Freedom is always ________
Freedom is for _______
Freedom is only _______

And you will hear it spoken, as a finality, and the stamp of your slavery, and your servitude in one way:

Freedom is only through_____ always for _____ and only from ______.

Your life truly is yours. You are autonomous, and you are the only master of your own person. Stand against the people who tell you otherwise. Stand against them or lose your only chance for freedom, the one freedom that hasn’t been taken from you… the freedom to fight for liberty’s very meaning.