Darkness blankets the city as she would, when I remember how she closed the curtains, turned off the light, and tucked me in at night. At this point I knew nothing bad would happen, all the doubts or worries became rose pedals and cherry blossoms dancing in my head as I would gently, drift off to a world where only my mind could go. The night young, but so was I, though I still try to reside in such a world as the past, to replay it over and over, wanting never to forget. Neglecting the present I concentrate on the doors in front of me, special doors that open themselves by the push of a button, and allows a person to travel vertically. Quite an improvement to the building, considering it has well over fifty floors. I watch as the light reaches my floor, the doors open at the sound of a chime, and I exit out to walk to my apartment on the felt like carpet. I just moved in recently and I still had much to unpack. With the traveling I do everyday I feel like I am always packing, unpacking–the cycle that never ends. I gently slide the key in to unlock the door. I flick the lights on, exposing all the unopened boxes, mismatched clothing lying about, and one of my windowscapes shattered. . . .

Glass shatters against the bare, white wall as shadows sway in the moonlight. Glass sticks jaggedly, through the thin membrane, its presence conjures up an awakening from within. I stare at the glass as I stare back at myself, seeing the oddly familiar reflection, like an old friend who I have missed all these years. This all too familiar feeling takes hold, but only for a second. I close my eyes, bow my head, while the wind rushes past: I breath in and hold, then exhale to steady myself from the dark edges below. I balance between life and death, looking below the great chasm of city lights to my left, and to my right the safety of a mildly furnished apartment with a cracked window and a white wall with punctured glass sticking out of it. Thoughts flash through the mind, wild, outlandish thoughts, but thoughts of a single person who believes what he is doing is right. The front door pushes open, a light turns on, voices are heard. Immediately, fear takes hold …..

I would cry, for awhile.

Tears trickling down, eyes closed, not willing to accept the facts, seeing only the inconsistencies, the infallibility, the doubts, spurting about from within, I’d cry to numb the pain. Numbing would not be enough though, I would need something stronger, more caustic.

The times. The years. The pain. All would come back in a rush to my head as the tears came in fits, missed memories castrated before me– lost and forgotten I would be. A six-letter word that would eat me alive. The only choice I had left was one: Survive.

Preparation is the key, when one knows he or she has little time to live. Living, then, becomes an obsession, a radical revealing of self. Everything that used to be difficult now is not. All the balls come tumbling down in the order  you choose. Breakfast always looks good. The closest ones you love are always by your side. When one puts it in all perspective, life does not look as scary, instead, it looks fragile and worn and fragmented. And one never wants to let go, only reminisce, like a man still longing for his passed away love.

Time, too, becomes relevant. Nostalgia can grip many at this point, but one must remember to keep to the present. One can remember his life in a snippet, a redundant aftertaste, always lingering, wanting never to go away. The years of school, summer love, people met and hated, how your favorite dog passed, mom’s cooking, your first paycheck, the first snow, and how people always remembered you, even over years passed. After this stage of conceded love there is a time for questions, questions about your future.

Given only an allotted time to live, one must seek counsel, mentors, and loved ones. Being locked up in a library, finding a way to live a little longer, can be taxing. Introversion never satisfies the lost, only deepens pride and self-worth. Losing yourself in the array of numbers and words may only heighten your will to live, but also drain you in the process. Finding a community is the next best approach. Leaning on people who can help will find the solutions to your questions, and a bucket list helps as well.

Writing it down, writing your life away helps quell the pain. You are dying, now, what will you do about it? You begin to conspire a battle plan to fight and not give in. You hold on and do not back off–you are stubborn. You take control of your life, focusing on the good, putting away the bad, restoring the balance. Life becomes a little sweeter as you consume your time with reassuring thoughts and future endeavors–you begin to dream, once more.

“I have fought a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith,” from II Timothy 4:7, reveals the necessity of life and how important it is to live life to the fullest, and when it is over one can look back and say ‘well done,’ and move on. There is a time to fight, but also a time for peace, accepting life for what it is, and living it one day at a time keeps us on the edge of existence. We will only try as hard if we have others around willing to try just as hard, willing to pick up the cross, waiting to gather the flock, trusting others around.

Unconditional, Irresistible, Heartwarming love is the last step to mend all the broken pieces together, so one can make sense of his or her last moments of life. Basing all life decisions on love is easy, if not pragmatic. If you are given a date of your death you are asked to sign your own death warrant, figuratively speaking. If you were given a task and  had a certain amount of time to complete it, would you still attempt at finishing, even though you knew your life would end upon finishing? No. You would, painstakingly, draw it out, not willing to accept fact, for the fact is the absence of truth.

Cancer is a terrible truth to lie about. What would one do to escape the truth that kills? Run. Hide. Fight. Retreat. Fail. Give In. The human condition, then, plays a part, setting our choices aside and letting pre-destination take its course. Why are we so willing to let that happen? We have a choice; we have a way; we have a dream. Everyone has a choice, the question is if you are with me or against me. And the next question is if you are against me will I fight or will you supersede me until we meet again. That is the question we all seek when fighting to kill, to survive, to live.

Cancer is only a six letter word.

to learn more about cancer and how deadly it can be visit: http://www.survivingmesothelioma.com

thank you,

-don

It is not about the road or the date, but the time and the space, in the survival of a father and son. In a hopeless world with cheerless dreams as the ravens scream, as bare bones litter the wasteland as humanity tears itself limb from limb, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, bears this theme: a man and a son, the bond holding them through until the bitter end, fighting for a reason to live.

The first event renders the man having flashbacks of his wife before her death, her suicide. She wants to die. He does not. “We’re survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.” “Survivors? she said.” “Yes.” “What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.” This exert explains the hopelessness the wife exchanges with her husband. “They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves…” “But I don’t dream at all,” the woman continues. The woman no longer cares for her life and embraces death leaving her husband and her son alone. The man dreams of her still, though she is gone, there is that sense of longing. To her living was dying; to the man living was taking care of his son.

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” This one passage encompasses the environment on which the story takes place: the disposition of father and son, the hopelessness, the struggle.

Dreams also play a unique twist to the novel; to dream is worse than lying awake for the man and the boy. The man can only dream of what if’s of his son and him not making it; the boy does not reveal his dreams, afraid of what the man would say. “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up. I wont let you.” This is the man telling his son the reason they are still living.

It is not reason alone that the man still lives, but the love he expresses to his son in hope for a better tomorrow. The wife did not or would not listen, and left her life to embrace death, however the father did not; he seen it as an act of selfishness and stayed with his son as long as his lived—the reason why the father lived.

Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone. This is the man reinforcing his commitment to his son that he will never live him or forsake him.
The man asks if he can tell a story, the boy replies no. The boy says stories are not true, but the man says they do not have to be. “Yes. But in the stories we’re always helping people and we don’t help people.” Stories?
“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”   Explain?
“We were lucky.” Dying father to son. “You have to carry the fire.” A resilience to keep on keeping on?
“Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”  Innocence in the young?
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” This is the very last paragraph of the book. I have no idea what it means? The world was made whole, now wasted because of humanity?
I can feel the strong sense of sympathy one would have when reading this novel, especially for a father. The father telling his son “we are the good guys,” but his son, a skeptic, when the man encounters the few people left on the road. Going south was there meaning; it brought a sense of meaning to their lives, restored a sense of hope for better things to come. When they make it to the ocean I thought the book was finished. But no. The man has to die and the son lives with the “good guys” at last. The man dying was one of the saddest parts in the book I suppose, but we all knew it would happen: one would die, one would live on to tell the story of their journey. McCarthy chose the son, symbolizing the hope of tomorrow, the sacrifice a father would make for his child, or perhaps the willingness humanity will lay for another, in love for another. This would be classified as a post-modern work with a father’s blessing on it.
Just give some thoughts of your overall impression of the book. Explain why McCarthy wrote this apocalyptic novel and why did it impress you so much. Why did you want us to read such a book for American Lit class though it was voluntary? Which part of the book do you the most? Do you like his dictation, his figurative and sometimes poetic speak? I see how he breaks a lot of rules. Do you agree with all his rule breaks with grammatics and mechanics? What would say to an aspiring writer who just read this book? What would you tell him to look for, to analyze, to comprehend? Are any of his other books quite as provoking? Can you refer me to other books such as this? I hope these are not too many questions. Answer them when you can. If I have others, which I already do, I will try to work them out myself. Thank you once again for sacrificing your time for me professor.

Lakeland—Open your eyes and awaken from the dream that God has given you. Erwin McManus delivers this provocative paradigm in Wide Awake, a book which provides the necessary ingredients to satiate a human need for self-discovery, to transform your dreams into reality.
McManus focuses on the individual and the vocations one must become in order to achieve his or her dreams. The individual must first awaken the dream to become the hero with the passion invested inside. “A dream needs a person to bring it to life.”
After the dream is thought the artist comes into play. Igniting the dream with a future by planning to release the dream into the unknown, in creating a portal to reality. “A culture is only as great as its dreams and its dreams are dreamed by artists.”
The basis of discover as an explorer takes your dreams closer with reality, in finding your insatiable curiosity. Learning like a child provides the understanding of how you live your life in this world. The desire to learn draws your dreams to the relative in substantiating your ideology into reality.
“To adapt is to not to surrender but to become unstoppable.” In order to grow and become what your dreams define you as one must subject to his surroundings. He must conform to the environment in order to understand. To help change people you first must realize change.
I like how you must be a believer in yourself and in your expectations. You must be an “eternal optimist” McManus reiterates, even though you know the world is what it is.
As believing you must focus on that belief McManus explains. Within our lives we spend too much time dispersed, fragmented within. We must recognize the interconnection with everything on earth and concentrate on our belief God’s given us.
Then we must create; we must impress others; we must act; we must define the unknown by juxtaposing our idealism with realism as an activist. If you can’t see stand up!
After this we can turn hedonist and enjoy life as God intended. Releasing our joy for the world to enjoy creates the positive resilience that rebounds us from the depressing tolls of reality.
The romantic returns as McManus tells us to invest into others. For without the love of people there will be no sense of meaning. To love yourself would be to love others. For as you help the people around you lead them to their dreams, and in return the same will occur to you. Knitting yourself closely to a community provides the opportunities for your romance to grow: spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically.
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work with us.” We must imagine to become who we want to be through the dreams God gave us.
This book had my heart clamped on every page and I could not tear my eyes away—in having the personal touch, like a love letter written to us all. McManus changed my line of thought in what is most important to me—my dreams.

The distant hum of recurrence, reverberating off my ear canal—I shun the reality around, hoping, praying for some type of revelation to ease my self-capitulation, my persistence of non-existence.

I create just to donate, scrawled up paperbacks of leafless dissent—my, my, my how time flies, just like instant bloody butterflies.

To ponder yet only wonder the railing of the interpretation of the misanthropic, generalized too often to the discovery of the unwanted—subtle sublime syndicated beyond the meaning—please—lets keep on dreaming,

Forty winks, understood as sleep, consider the bliss, of an over intimidated mist—let us all join the fun, before the day comes undone, dwarfing our dismal lives once more.

Albeit neither can confide the wishes of another, two can play this insatiate game if only one would tell the other—

Found—if only for a second the true meaning as if to drown because of it;
Searching still, in lost for the right key, mixing the black with the white once more—
Confine to surmise the lights as they flicker on and on—who is there as I hear only a song to steady my longing for…

Relate only to Negate as time goes by, to only substantiate the time as worthwhile—
Little smidgens somehow find out our lost gelid diffidence, through the looking glass of non-conformity—desperate, daring, dearing to those, to those willing—misplaced.

My mind is flexed, impressed, depressed with the whims of reality. I have come to the conclusion that films shape culture like novels did back in the day, or is it the film and novel that display the culture we live in? Either way we live in a deprecated society, wallowing in our own decadence, ignorantly bliss of all euphemisms projected from the public, and joined in happy celebration still.

I am now in the Realism Era in my American Lit class and I find it, if not irrevocable morbid than tragically distasteful as I finished Maggie, the pinnacle of humanistic realism that I’ve read thus far by Crane. The construed texture made visible is real, perhaps to real for that era, for it was immediately shunned from public eyes, being too callously descriptive in the depiction of dirty street life. In a current film that might depict the same loathing is Watchmen which I could also render my same bias as for Maggie, for Watchmen did not only bring too much pornographic scenes violent and sexual as Professor Kirk had put it, but irrevocable obscene, like Maggie was during Crane’s era.

Kirk’s beliefs and values stand fast on a religious foundation, as do all of us that go to this Christian institution. But one of my classmates differed. With our post, post modernism still in swing he viewed the film as a classic depiction of the American dream, in what is left of it anyhow. As many religious people did with Crane’s work, throwing it back in his face; I personally think we religiously sound individuals do just the same. Knowing they were more religious sound in Crane’s time than our time shows how we embraced Watchman as others despised Maggie. I believe now we can view Maggie for what it is because of the changing times (era’s) but not Watchman. Thinking it to be philosophical it its portrayal and from other conceived sources as a “good film,” my light was stained with blood, as I watched the killing, the screaming, the horror that man has fallen into and he can never quite get out of. I tried to see beyond that, but due to the excessive, unnecessary evocations I gave into the humane flesh and stayed, and did not live like a true converted Christian should. This is what people back then thought of Maggie and that is why I see Crane like Moore in their desperation to appeal to the desires of the human flesh–realism. And it sells. This may not only be an excessive addiction to us now but later it will define us (America) for who we are as a nation.

As we gradually make our way through the era’s in our lit class I can see the snowball affect taking form—the innocuous subtleties which people think won’t permeate society does. And in the end it will come late in the night and bite are little heads off. I view Watchmen and Maggie as realism would of humanity—the false pretenses of thinking this world can change is just as a wife thought her husband would get off the tube and read instead. The addiction ladies and gentleman has stupefied us and we are too ignorant and too selfish to realize it.

I watch and wait as my ape of a professor questions us from last class. The class, absent-minded, day-dreaming, injudicious like mice, are rattling their cages for freedom. We politely laugh at his corny jests but are still caged in this white window of weariness. His black and red stripe tie stains his all white collar shirt, with pen heads sticking out of his left chest pocket, as if they want freedom from the pocket of disdain. I think how much a waste of time this class possesses; for as I write this I am too much wishing the future to come true and in too much in rumination of the past to consider the now present.

Then hearing the annoying questions some of these girls project drives me to the edge of insanity. I guess I should listen, I guess I should pay close attention to the psycho babble of media management, but I care not too. This white asylum picturesque a moment of ego-centrism, stifles my thought. The constant bombardment cuts my embodiment to an unregistered defect of only unobtrusive dealings. Here we go, another senseless analogy to stimulant our sick minds. Everyone hates everyone, fact of life. I pierce the window with a stare. The huge swaying oaks play lazily in the wind, almost enticing me to break out of this white cage of derelicts. With the door ajar, open for anyone to pass we are still here, subjected to the bias rhetoric being suspended in the thin air of time. I stick to the seat as if film is plastered to my end. The Italian chick seated next to me is forcibly in the same manner. People annotate the words spoken, but I will not stoop to such low contempt. They only do it to pass not to learn. They are forced and submit, while I dispute for a fighting alternate route of growth and understanding…

My life resounds of an empty existence, a perpetual struggle through the cycle of being human—bound by time. I wonder sometimes why God would make our lives bittersweet; with the taste corroding our true intentions for what is true, but in actuality false, with everything living a lie with only ourselves to blame for the imposed improvisation we disseminate.

Man—the pinnacle of God’s creation subjected to a lowly, despised, voluptuous maggot, seeking pleasure where pleasure awaits, to only let man gnash their teeth in utter infamy for eating the forbidden fruit. Our construed meaning for history defines our self-less worth, for the biased accounts that we learn from as truth; prove false, which undoubtedly resolves our peace with mankind. The war raging incessantly in our minds of what is true or false, black or white, day or night, light or dark; and before you know it you become stained with the sanguine realization that life is too complicated to figure out. Like we intellectuals (try to be the elite minds of tomorrow anyway) rationalize with ourselves everyday what truth and lie should be defined as. We trick ourselves you see: for our defining it, with our biases, unbalances the truth and the lie, leaving the question unanswered once more. Even if someone tried to explain to me this struggle I seem to have with myself; it will not enlighten me, but only define your view on the matter, your bias.

Clarifying what my “mein kampf” deals with, is the mindless battle we seem to always run to and cannot seem to retreat from. It harangues us, like a nagging step-mother wanting to know how the wife’s cooking went for the thousand’s time, or what we believe to be is true but in reality it’s not—all men lie. It’s fact of life I have taken with a grain of salt. Not trusting anyone brings me to a state of independence where I have learned not to lean on anyone, but only to Him for complete and transparent satisfaction. It might also be why I have this lone wolf mentality, caring less if I have friends and more along the route of all take and no give, which is sad. Most of my time spent is in solitude, for I find peace within, with no drama to deal with, no annoyances persisting, being who I want to be, in my own little world, with my choice of utensils beckoning me to submerse myself in the realm of phantasm.