Radioactive Man

meaningful or less

He was feeling so miscellaneous for a Tuesday in June and so he laid his head down to think about a thing or two and what he ended up thinking was that maybe what he thought was meaningful about life was not actually meaningful at all. In reality, this wasn’t the first time he thought that and the reoccurring nature of this thought made him think about the nature of such reoccurrences and he wondered if the reoccurrences spoke to the truthfulness of what reoccurred. A fear gripped him deeply because he had lived for so long with the meaning that he felt was so deeply a part of the universe and he wondered what was deeper, the fear in his heart of the possible meaninglessness of life or the meaning he felt he always knew. He tried to reach down within himself to feel which was deeper and he began to feel some things with a particularity he hadn’t felt before until he felt the edges of something that he didn’t quite understand whether it was his fear or the meaning. He felt and felt some more until he discerned that it was a spherical mass of a certain impenetrability. If he had to guess, he would have guessed that it would have fit in the palm of his hand but would not have disappeared in his own grip and it was in that moment that he realized this was the thing that the fear had gripped but that what he needed to understand was within the sphere and he wondered how to penetrate the sphere to learn of its contents. Was it empty or was it the meaning that he cherished? Time passed and he pondered this matter with weight and intensity and a hope to find his way in and eventually realizing that he was gripping this sphere more tightly than the fear had ever griped it and he realized the fear had been displaced by his own tight grip. This realization astonished him and in a reactive way, he let loose his grip. No longer gripping the sphere, which was also no longer griped with fear, it seemed at peace and relaxed and he also felt at peace and relaxed and in that moment, the sphere itself seemed to disappear yet what occupied it remained and what remained was a spherical space that was empty but empty in way that he had never considered empty could be because it was infinite and invited him to reach further within always going further into the infinite space and he realized that both this invitation and infinity was in fact the meaning that went beyond all fears and meaninglessness that he might ever be imagined. 

the armchair

Back when we had a variety of furniture to sit on and plenty of things to do, nobody really paid much attention attention to what we were sitting on. Days might go by without sitting in an armchair and I can only recall ever finally sitting in one out of random availability more than conscious choice. I guess I just took it for granted that I could always sit in an armchair anytime I wanted and never really thought of sitting in one as a luxury of leisure. But eventually everything changed and we were forced to leave to where we find ourselves now, strangers in a foreign place not entirely welcomed other than to be welcomed as visitors, temporary people that others need not get to know or invest in because our status will never be quite the same as everyone else’s.  We’re fortunate that we were given a place to live and some places to go to occupy our time but we’re acutely self-aware that something is amiss and as a result we can’t quite fall into the invisible routines that so easily evaporate our time by some mystical passage that we never notice until it’s gone and we fall in beds to sleep the night away.  Then again, I’m not sure that was good or bad...but anyways. It’s different when you have to consciously spend each hour without those routines causing an abundance of time to pile up in a day and it’s best not to think of the weeks of incalculable time ahead that you would never know how to spend if you really did think about it knowing you’ll only be left with your memories of what was and what was includes your dreams of what could have been. Still, you end up thinking a lot about those things when you have so much time for nothing. When we arrived here all we had was an empty room and we slept on the floor, which made our nights restless adding to our empty hours. Eventually we found mattresses and they were quite a luxury after having slept on the floor for so many nights but surprisingly they faded into the background quickly and even became ordinary as our only pieces of furniture to sit on and do the things that we once had other furniture for such as tables and chairs and stools and benches and even armchairs. Eventually, someone brought home an arm chair they found somewhere and that never became ordinary rather it was amongst our most coveted of our very few possessions. It wasn't much in comparison to armchairs  from our past life and in all honesty it was kind of dirty but we easily overlooked such details because while beds are better than nothing to sit on, they lacked things I never realized were so important such as back support when you want to sit up. As it turned out, beds were most comfortable when you wanted to lay down on them but you don’t always want to lay down. I’m not sure where we got the armchair but there it was one day and we all commented regularly how lucky we were to have it even if it cramped the little space we had. But with only one arm chair and too little room for too many people, it became quite a sought after piece of furniture and we ended up quarreling over what was fair and who got to sit in it next or who got to sit in it longer. When you finally did get your chance you always wondered how long you had before someone else would complain until you gave up and got out. That’s why someone came up with the idea of the schedule. We could count on the schedule for a reserved time to have the armchair all to ourselves and that gave us some peace of mind while we sat in it and the peace of mind coupled with a slight luxury gave birth to a freedom of mind I had never felt before. And so it became that our prescribed times to sit in a chair, which had once been a punishment, were now looked forward to and served as moments of individual healing from the collective heartbreak we had suffered. I once would not have known how to spend my time in a chair but then I came to look forward to it and absorbed each minute I sat their relishing each thought I had in that chair. Somehow everything was different in that moment. It was as if being stripped of everything I once knew and then given this one moment to look forward to wound my mind up so tightly that once I eventually sat in the chair my mind let loose and things came out of I didn’t know were there.  Thoughts and energies and powers to create and even when I finally allowed myself, hope. I was able to wonder how I might ever resurrect any hope I had ever hoped for and for some reason in those moments in that chair I could do that when everywhere else I was just reminded of who I wasn’t anymore. In that chair I was able to imagine who I might become.  

fire

a true story

Locking his friend in the rabbit cage seemed like such a good idea at the time because it would provide them a certain degree of realism and drama as they pretended to be superheroes. He pretended to be Superman and his friend was going to be Batman. The rabbit cage may just have been an old empty rabbit cage but in his imagination it was much more. The fact that his friend could actually fit inside the cage and that he could lock his friend in there from the outside elevated their imaginary play to something more real than it had ever been before. It was as if they were a little closer to actually being Batman and Superman. The rabbit cage, however, wasn’t entirely empty. It was just mostly empty with a small beehive taking up a fraction of space. He could have seen the bees as a problem but the realism the cage provided far outweighed in his mind any potential risk the bees might have presented. It was too perfect to pass up and he imagined that if his friend kept still and didn’t bother the bees that the bees wouldn’t have any reason to bother him. His friend did suggest that the bees might pose a more significant risk than he was appreciating at the time so they reasoned with each other each discussing the matter from each of their perspectives but he couldn’t accept allowing the bees to ruin the potential offered by the cage especially when it seemed that neither of them could know for sure that the bees would actually sting his friend. It also seemed to him that it would have been very unreasonable of the bees to sting his friend if his friend would stay still and not bother them. Eventually his friend relented and got in the cage. He closed the caged and even locked it to prevent any escape as a supervillain would have really done.  The plan was that once he imprisoned his friend, he would pretend to fly around the house one time and then return to free his captive superhero friend. It all made so much sense to him. His friend wouldn’t be in there long, the bees would have no reason to bother his friend since his friend wouldn’t bother them and it would be as if his friend really had been a superhero that had really been captured by a supervillain and that he would actually save and help escape. Once the latch was turned, he began to run around the house, pretending to fly by outstretching his arms in front of him.  As he ran, his heart beat from the excitement caused by all the elements coming together to complete what he had envisioned. It was so perfect to him except for a certain uneasiness that began to creep into his heart. He ran faster at the urging of his uneasiness and when he finally returned, his friend was crying. He had been stung by the bees. Neither of them were sure how many times he had been stung but just one would have been enough for him to regret ever having even wanted to convince his friend to get into that old rabbit cage. It had seemed like such a good idea to begin with but in actuality, it was not.

follow your heart

something went wrong

Their confidence in him had always surpassed any confidence he had in himself. People had told him on a few occasions that he would be good at whatever he did and to not worry about the future. He hoped they were right and found a lot of comfort in what they said but he never found what they said to be true. Had they all been wrong? Did they just extrapolate what they saw in a nice likable person beyond the usefulness of likability?  Maybe in the end they just saw what they wanted because they liked him so much and they didn’t recognize the false positive their affections generated. Later in life he wondered what they had all seen in him and wondered why ultimately not everyone saw it because if everyone had seen it, he would have had different opportunities and his life wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. Things would have been different and maybe he would have accomplished whatever it might have been that would have provided that elusive sense of satisfaction he had hoped to achieve. Maybe they were right but something somewhere along the way went wrong. Maybe he went wrong somewhere and he wondered what he might have done wrong. Among the realm of so many decisions where there was no wrong or right about them, maybe there were still right or wrong decisions. He thought maybe beyond the universal truths of everyone’s existence there’s a right or wrong in the kingdom of self.  And maybe he just chose wrong exiling himself, causing himself to be banished from the wealth and treasure of his own kingdom forever leaving him with a longing to return to where he felt at home and complete.

the future

They told him that the new nature interface system was the most advanced nature interface system that had ever been developed in the history of the future but that didn’t really console him in the way the men in the lab coats had intended with their nearly falsetto voice inflections.  What he really wanted was to actually interface with nature on his own without some invented system.  He told them what he wanted and they looked at him as if he was a naive little boy that didn’t know any better and could not appreciate all the advances that the future had to offer. He was a little boy of only 7 years of age but he knew what he wanted even though he couldn’t really explain what it was or why he wanted it. They continued to encourage him to accept what they were saying and they tried just as hard to convince themselves that they were as convincing as they hoped to be with the boy even though that just a particle of doubt made it very apparent to them that they really weren’t that convincing. They chose to disregard the particle and tried even harder to make the premise of their convincing true by talking more and more and pitching their voices higher and higher until they thought that they must be convincing the boy and themselves of what they wanted to convince him of. The boy had stopped listening to what they were saying a long time ago and was only listening to how high their voices had become and watched how exaggerated their expressions and movements were as they talked to him.  Unfortunately, the little boy didn’t have any choice in the matter and his disembodied head was eventually placed inside the nature interface system interfacing with the collection of nerve endings bundled at the base of his brain sending information to his brain that would approximate nearly realistic sensory perceptions of the world. His brain began to flood with new information that hadn’t previously been available to him waking the dormant parts of his brain as they interpreted the data into sensory experiences. He was so overwhelmed by these new experiences that the men in the lab coats began to fade from his consciousness and all that remained within him of their existence was some particle of a notion of something about something that really wasn’t that convincing but he couldn’t really articulate what it was. Meanwhile, the men in lab coats moved on to the next disembodied head nearly convinced that this time they would completely convince the next person that the nature interface system was the best nature interface system that the future had ever made but not quite realizing that the discontent they were trying to dispel in so many people had so little to do with the system itself and mostly to do with their own discontent of the future. They further didn’t fully realize that they were trying to convince themselves that they were convincing about the nature interface system so that they could also convince themselves that they didn’t actually feel the same discontent that everyone else felt about future.

stickman with baggage

the pudding of life

why bother?