2.

I suppose I once shared because I loved so much I had to. I burned intensely and it transformed my rigidity into a more pliable material; even if only artisan hands are allowed near, whether they be on rich or poor alike. 

My family's warnings and common sense ring true, but still I have an appetite for self-destruction. It’s the two polarities and the pull between them that seem to electrify me. I flit back and forth between the two. The reductionist calls it, ‘love,’ and, ‘fear,’ and nothing more – the two seeds that twist around to make the tree of life; both must be respected. Fear is not bad, and love is often scary. In fact, I think sometimes the most terrifying thing is love – it transforms you; it generates a heat that melts you and makes you pliable; and if it is ripped away and not continually heated in a vat of fresh tears that dry naturally with time, its absence can calcify one into a monster or a shell. For me there is nothing more threatening than love—but it’s only scary, and fright is a choice, a reaction, and a choice to the persistent reaction.

I can choose to be courageous; as in, trigger courage when faced with fear—this is the recipe in building confidence—equal parts fear and courage. The Madman is still laughing at everything. Other times something jumps out and impels a reaction; sometimes many things sequentially—and related or unrelated they correlate with an equal reaction; like a droning depression or stress post trauma. Physics applied to emotional states is all this is. Action, reaction, our action, new reaction.

Participation in humanity and the travesties and majesties we build and destroy make us implicit in madness. As children one soaks in and is born from the very madness we must worthily profess and so often violently deny or distort. The whole point of my anything is essentially, one cannot deny their own madness by any stretch of any imagination and the varying degrees are only relevant to those mad to different degrees.

To be worthy of madness is to be able to be transparent and authentic; to have courage as the response when fear is the seductress and to be overt and explicit about our intention and in doing so call out any ugly pride we may protect by any obfuscation we justify. This is not to say one must reveal all mystery, but more that one must actually be able to craft it authentically while engaged in the social and private experience of humanity—nature come alive, dancing and destroying. 

If we start with a basic agreement on our collective madness, then perhaps we can begin slowing down the troubles of eons our species has accepted so deeply as to acceptingly presume war and famine though created, are a reflection of what is ‘natural,’ –because those are byproducts of our aggressive activity to prove and justify our sanity and righteousness; and that’s both understandable and nuts. In a wider context, as should often be taken at first pass, even the foundations for conflicting ideology are resting on the giants of hunger and greed and lust for unrelenting, unchecked, supreme command—the kind that doesn’t need to contend with its consequences; these tendencies come from fear and dress in strength and nationalism; fundamentalism and degrees of aggression from violent and overt to passive and subtle—what we often refer to as, ‘politics as usual.’

The lust for command is strongest in the weak, and perverted into dominance for the strongest of the strong. In one conception the weak are the drag and they force a heavier burden on those trying to accelerate; on the other side of the coin is the perspective that the strong have no consideration for the weak and simply charge ahead claiming to be charitable, but only to the point that charity is still required, and solutions that matter to the wider populous are not prioritized. In fact, the strong often spend resources to retrain and retain the mind of the weak, and the weakest of the weak are taken in as if being abducted in an old sci-fi film; they come out spouting nothing from nothing and become the harbingers of their own destruction. The coin looks suspended, but its only spinning. All society has seen this happen until enough live in enough poverty and then revolt is attempted. 

These divides and categories cannot of course be spoken about without the banal but critical point of economics. The promise of resources through a fiat economy has long been the driver of turmoil and innovation for human kind; but resources are only scare when the conception we take to their distribution and usage are limited to the justification that we are given reign to subdue them in our image, which just so happens to reflect the image of the all supreme creator of the universe; it is as if our own consciousness may be the universes addiction to self-destruction.