SONG OF THE DAY: Time of the Preacher

Some “tugging at the roots of family” energy swirled in today, blurring the lines of spirituality and random chance of the Universe, which isn’t really blurred at all but the exact same thing, except Earthly people have perverted spirit into dogma and ruined the power of it for folks like me. Someone in Minnesota benched an old dirtgod moniker from 4 years ago which said “Dot & Tuna’s Firstborn”, and at the same time, I’m discussing the tendrils of alcoholism with my own offspring, while also receiving a poem submission for my zine from an amazing young person in West Virginia who wrote about the “synthetic exhilaration” that certain families chase, and when this young poet read her poem in West Virginia a few weeks ago, I was sitting at a table nearby, sort of MCing the affairs at that point, and she read, “And the children? Doomed from conception,” and I wanted to cry on the spot, and then wanted to cry again when I read it today in my inbox, and it’s one of those lines of poetry that is a shovel that struck the septic tank everybody forgot where it was located, and now the shit is leaking into the yard, but it had to happen. It’s been a time of the preacher since most all our stories began, but the words have been hollowed out by blank-eyed sermonizers more worried about the weight of the collection plate than helping sinners to love themselves. When one scans the environment and sees all these people who appear doomed, and feel doomed themselves, a compassionate response would never be one of condemnation (or deportation, or denial of humanity). I hate to see the patterns repeat, and the ripples of time still rippling all around me, tossing about those I love, even if I have figured out how to halfway shimmy my own ass up on this rock and feel less susceptible to them. And from your own struggles, you know how slippery and slimy the rock is trying to crawl up out the muck, and how good the momentary exhilaration of embracing the shit show can pretend to be. And you can share the possibility of climbing up on the rocks into the sunshine, but you can’t do it for nobody else. Shit, they might get up on your rock and be mad at you because it ain’t how they hoped anyways, and then they slide back down into it all, and start bouncing around inside the chaotic ripples of the doomed, and you love them, and you want to make it all better, but you can’t. You’re just a person, not a god. “Now the preachin’ is over, and the lesson’s begun.” Hopefully.