.s.a.m.h.a.i.n.

blessed be.

i've been thinking...

about happiness.

...

and i find it strange that i'm happy, or moreover: happy for the sake of being happy-

without all the Pollyanna aftertaste or

the thick, marmalade flavoured sap of Field of Dreams,

no,

more like

an immediate call to explore my life

protect it

cherish it

set myself apart from my family, because

i am not them.


i refuse.

instead i have forged a code of ethics revolving around my ideas of

self-value

i'm worth more than i sell myself hourly to my job;

intelligence and aptitude

and a certain, peculiar manner of thought processing

all my own

and all completely misunderstood.


there is freedom in owning your life-

forever i pined for a dark highway
tall trees
scent of wild, feral earth
in the west
by the pacific
salt in the breeze
and complete autonomy...

it's still hard not to have it

but i still want it enough to know

i will have it

one

of



these


days (of mine)

what do ya know...

i know everything. i wish i did. i am glad i don't.

you never know the hard roads until they're underfoot, and

out of control.

doesn't matter how many steep, rocky paths upon which you've embarked-

you can only get better.

learn and try-

fuck up and learn-

learn how to live and accept the inevitable life dice-

we all die.




i have so much to live for.

so much to be thankful for.

i have so many to love and who love back.




some love is distant.

some love is close by,

some love is an ebb tide-

the shore you will always look

for footprints.



people come

people go.


i will come

and i will go.

but-

not now, please

universe

god

truth-

it is not yet my time.



please don't take me away....


(victory)

last rites

"oh laffing man

what have you won?

don't tell me what cannot be done-

my little mouth,

my winter lungs-

don't tell me what cannot be done..."

innmiss.

away away away

yool' hawk

eyes big round POPS from the feather

whatter you lookin four?

it's not my money you wantin

nothin more than some change i got

rumblin' round in an ol' tin can

big bird

g'awn now, getonyer way

and go'on flappin

away

away

away

looking for lonely

....guess i found it

oh, frances

"God Dies," by Frances Farmer

No one ever came to me and said, "You're a fool. There isn't such a thing as God. Somebody has been stuffing you." It wasn't a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn't any more, it didn't shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. "I am clean, now. I've never been as clean. I'll never be cleaner." And somehow, it was God. I wasn't sure that it was just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn't religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, "God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children." That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, "I am clean. I am sleepy." And then I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. "Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings." It usually worked. God became a super-father that couldn't spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn't have much to do about hats, people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one. It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn't they see it? It still puzzles me.