The Reckoning of Jean-Pierre, Chapter 3

The Dream

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As the sun shone over the mountains upon the Hamlet of Peter a miracle was about to happen. A long, long time ago, when goat's wool was still grey there was a great dark horizon stretched out upon a vast blank canvas. God, in his own eternal wisdom saw stretching before him this vast dark landscape. In it he saw the outline of a man looking upon it as it had remained untouched — Cover and close your eyes right now and you can still see it. — In God’s mind he watched it carefully and then he let it expand and unfold. Upon this darkness he unleashed all his great knowledge of poetry, arts, love, natural life and eternal wisdom and light. He gave all the animals a special knowledge of themselves and their own nature but within man he placed a certain type of curious doubtfulness. He imparted on the empty soul of man a special gift of knowledge and soul. The ability to contemplate a different kind of hereafter. A newfound curiosity that would make his destiny separate from the rest of Earths creatures. A specific purpose that would over time give him the impression that he had dominion over the future of the Earth, the Cosmos and Nature itself, but also great internal suffering too. God stirred in these human borne children a feeling of doubt and imaginary loneliness that would take over that child when faced against their own unbridled ego. A humbleness. A pious nature borne from within. A nature man quickly forgets when he surrounds himself by machines. This bitter battle attempting to command over and above nature herself. The chauvinistic conflicts of the past had been ended henceforth. The nobility of the warrior caste had been erased. The technicians rule the present. The Machines rule the future! The human fighting and internal struggles of the past had been replaced by the conflicts of the machine. The Earth was this grand workshop amongst which God had placed mankind in this Cosmos and this is the place upon which my Great Grandfather, his sons, daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren hoped to thrive.

Our Hamlet had seen prosperous times too but those times were waning for much of the townspeople were growing tired, holding on to their old ways of thinking. It is time for their children to take the reins. We had heard of harsh times before. Our ancestors told us stories of living in filthy conditions, outhouses and abodes with no running water. A lack of sustenance and abundance, but an abundance of life. And death too. When my grandfather was just shy of four there was a lamb whom's mother had passed away and he nursed this lamb into its adulthood. It followed him everywhere and they became best friends running up the fjords and through the fields of Grandpas youth. When times were tough during the first war and the family went hungry they had to eat that lamb. That is how life was back then. But it was real. It was humble. I do not think we will know this type of real hunger and humility that they used to feel here in the future with our mass productions and all. The wars are over for now but Oh how pious Peter’s hamlet might still be lost some day. It was here in this small New England town where our Great Grandfather had built this workshop where he toiled. Our family made eye glasses and set forth measuring and grinding and repairing the townsfolk's lenses each day. His father had done the same and his uncles as well. We brought it with us here from Europe. Our family always rides the tiger of the times. We move forward. My Grandpa grew up in this workshop watching his father tinker with glasses gladly and debate with customers angrily. When Grandpa had been a young man, the family fled from the old foreign Cities. We wanted to prove ourselves in this small town on distant shores. My father and his older brother, Uncle Pantaleon, spent many days watching Grandpa toil too, arguing amongst our townsfolk about many mis-measured pupillary distances and as many trifling matter as that as well. Granpa was always the Grump to me. The angry rebellion amongst our family is well known. This place too was becoming like a large city and it had hustling bustling streets even back then. One day in this workshop the village idiot, Cleopatra was her name, left the door open and let out Grandpas favorite dog who was crushed by a carriage which rushed by. That little dog was crushed by the rushing age of time. Cleopatra was banished from the shop and never seen again. Grandpa was angry about his second lost childhood friend, the lamb, then the dog. Time and tide wait for no beast nor man. Such was the new life of hustle and bustle. On Saturdays when our Great Grandpa went to work in the shop my Grandpa would stay home and venture out with his brothers on their bicycles. Up the street was a devoutly religious family, the Lanphers, whom had a son named Charlie that my Grandpa's brothers would torment endlessly. My Grandpa and Charlie became great friends despite it all. Ah the stories I had been told of yesteryear. . .

My dear old Grandpa was such a good and noble happy man. At least that is what they used to tell me when I asked if he was always such an old grump. The War supposedly racked his brains inside and out and he quickly became a grumpy old codger of a being. This is how I always remembered him, snarling commands at anyone nearby like a drill sergeant. Always ringing in his ears, muttering and blabbering helplessly about the fate of man. Sound familiar? Like grandfather like father like son. After he came back from the War my grandmother sympathetically married him and they made my father and his siblings. Grandma always nurtured and comforted Granps. Everyone said his troubles came from spending time in those new crude tanks of warfare. “Built like solid tin cans!” he used to say, “har-har”. They would reverberate and deafen its victims trapped inside its cauldron of burning steam pipes and leaking oily hydraulics. A real fiery hazard of a death. He lost most of his close childhood friends during that War. A bunch of 16 years olds inspired to go abroad and to fight. The smartest and craftiest of which having been tossed in these new fangled contraptions in order to inflict a state-of-the-art kind of suffering on the recently vanquished. A contemporary version of a new gruesome kind of technical death. Despite all his trauma and nervous ticks he still spun an entertaining yarn and worked very hard. — I hope I am doing his lifetime and our little town justice. Dear Reader, I want you to know what life used to be like before all of this. — Grandpa would tirade about how his son, my father, was “Going to avoid such a grisly death as he and his fallen comrades had felt! That my dad was going to be a real engineer and entrepreneur some day! An uber-technician! A magnate of technical businesses.“ He wanted his son to not be a brute like he and his cohorts turned out to be and he knew that the educated garnered better positions in life when War-time came as he thought it always inevitably did.

Grandpa had some real tear jerkers too. He and his best-friend Charlie enlisted into the service the minute they both could on Charlies birthday. They both battled it out side by side in trenches saving each others lives more than a few dozen times. I remember the stories about Charlie well. That life that was frozen in time in my Granps memories. Towards the end of the War the last question Charlie ever asked my grandfather was, "Do you think God will forgive me when in my last moments I pull the pin from this hand grenade? Will he know that it was not for me that I had pulled it? Not to end my own suffering, but to kill my fellow man.” That was the last anyone had heard from Charlie, he was soon lost in an explosion of glorious requient might and later flyblown maggots. Charlie set out that dawn on a morning time raid against the supposed enemy with just a few bullets and a hand-grenade. Company supplies were low but he was determined to accomplish one last great thing in this world on his own. The way Charlie wanted his life to go down. His way to help end the inner battle spinning within us all. He simply wanted to know if he would go to hell for it. He wanted to have his choice in death and salvation at least. Cannot man at least choose his own path towards death? Is that all we have left?

I knew it was not always this way. Grandpa had a glorious upbringing in our little town of Petersham. My father and I grew up there too. The struggles growing up in a small rural agrarian village were real but it was an idyllic place to start out. Petersham was an old New England town which soon became a growing agricultural hub after the war. Hustling and bustling with its fresh arrivals home eager to work again, wanting to quiet the nightmares of warfare out of their minds. Finally some good times for strong men to enjoy! The Center of Town had a tiny old Country Store, filled with trinkets and candies and delights for a young child. How I used to go in and swipe a few chocolates into my pocket. Across from the Country Store was a fine New England Church, with its snow white pillars that matched the Town Hall in the square. The white Gazebo where the old time band would play tiddlywinks music on the hot humid summer nights. The Library built out of stone, its massive facade like a rock climbing cliff, with its tall monolithic halls in which the great classics were contained. The pure alabaster schoolhouse along the center of town with the old drinking well at the entrance where one could dip in a chalice and drink with the matriarchs of the town. It all seemed so ancient and forever. This really was an idyllic wonderland with it lilacs and lush green pastures, dotted with horses and sheep like little walking gemstones. Fine well-bred classic New England homes lining its main square standing as always and seemingly on and on forever. Our house was built in 1815 and placed 5 miles outside of the main meeting place down by the Swift River just before the watering hole which one could dive into the fine Swifty waters. Story goes that a man named Jesse Rogers built our home and maintained a mill nearby the river where they made palm hats. His old stone cellars still lined the banks of the old Mighty Swift. A manufacturing grave which would soon be re-kindled. Jesse Roger’s tombstone was permanently placed in an old cemetery next to our home. Some things still continued on as always.

Oh the idyllic years of our youth playing in the forests and amongst the pastures. My father playing with his brothers on these same fields. Me too. Lineage and generations stretching out beyond, unchanged, speaking as monuments of the ages. Young children hiding amongst the towering obelisks of willow and pine and oak trees. Breathing in the natural smells of our small rural village. Flowers and rivers, dandelions and reservoirs, estuaries with ancient roads going directly into their waters as if riding out to sea. The rising waters enveloping up small towns to provide the cities with much needed full cisterns of clean drinking water. We would hurry down to the rivers edge and cast our bodies in headlong then basking and laughing on the sun bleached rocks of the river. The small schoolhouse where our 13 mates learned until the age of 11. We were always surrounded by a large family in those days. Cousins and extended relatives. We were never alone even though maybe we often desired to be. This was before people stopped having children. Be careful what you wish for. In summers my grandfather bathed almost everyday in the cool rivers which meandered down from the frosty mountains and through this small village and out into the ocean. He and his family loved it here and called it home, but often they talked longingly about the origins they had come from too. Europe. The Great Pyrenees Mountains. Basque Country to Northern Catalonia. From the Kingdom of Aragon to Castille to Languedoc.

“Momma, tell me what Europe looks like?” Grandpa would ask my great-grandmother when he was just a small child.

“Oh my sweet little Pierre, you will see it too someday. It has old provincial buildings and many pretty colorful flowers too.” She would describe it all to him in great detail as he would later tell me while propped up on his knee.

Grandpa never really knew what Europe used to be like. The Europe he came to know was gritty, dirty, full of explosions, muck and mire. Dead horses and Calvary. All run over. Mashed and crushed into muddy slimy bits by tanks. His friends turned into cannon fodder. He had only seen faded pictures of what Europe used to look like before it was destroyed. It looked beautiful in the old photographs. An old European villa in the countryside surrounded by fields of pure gold. This was in deep contrast to the brown and dusty New England agricultural valley he grew up in covered in simple farms and homestead shacks. When my Grandpa was a child the homes outside of town used to look like hermits dwellings. But this is not the way he saw it. He loved his Petersham. He loved his family. He loved his country. He loved his history. The long great history of his culture and Western civilization. Before the War he thought they could save Europe from itself. Honorably even. That is how it was pitched back then in the propaganda before we began to hate the places we came from. Despise everything they had become in modernity. Turned into spiteful versions of a wretched future for humanity. He loved to tell us all about our own hamlet back in the early days, the family history. It made us all so happy and complete reminiscing about simpler times. Oh if I could only paint a picture like Grandpa did. I wish I could still rustle up his spirit.

This picturesque time for the children was always cut shorter and shorter. Even Grandpas youth was abbreviated in a moment. When my grandfather was eleven he got a job working the docks in Gloucestershire. On the docks he learned all the riggings and ways of the water by the time he was twelve. He would tell us so many amazing seafaring adventure tales. We never knew which were real or not. We heard that the children used to play by the boardwalk pier dancing gleefully with the maypole each Sunday after Church. The glistening sunlight and salty ocean mist hitting their faces, lighting up their eyes. He always said time seemed to pass by slower back then. The ebbs and flows of natural time had yet to be compartmentalized into fractions of machine time. This was before the Wars and everyone including the adults seemed happy. Happier and prouder just to be alive. People used to trust one another more. The society was more homogenous and therefore less geared towards efficiency. People were more compassionate towards one another. Then Grandpa began to see the adults crestfallen and forlorn eyes. It soon spread to the children as well and they would no longer play with the maypole. They spent less time in Church too. They grew older fast. Everyone knew trouble was looming ahead. He and his brothers and friends were sent off to fight in these Big Wars. It was man on man, Brother War. But with a new twist. The mechanical and electrical, pyrotechnic madness of man’s new peril. The death by the technicians hands. Uncaring, inhuman and insignificant technical gyrations destroying the widespread, unseen and often even innocent foes. It became a new type of War. The penultimate battle of the technicians destroying the warrior caste with mass casualty devices. The nobility of all men was lost in the end. Machines turned war from a possible chauvinistic game into a certainly devilish and inhumane one.

When the war was over my Grandpa received a letter from a soldier named Ernst Junger who fought for the other side. I will never forget what it said for the words always stayed with me. “Technology brought with it the exponential increase in the ability to create destruction. The Victors should not take revenge on the vanquished. The war was won by one side, but peace must be won by all. History was represented by a veil of tears, and all of mankind as equal subjects in suffering.” Grandpa held on to this letter until he died. My father found it later in his life and passed it down to me. Do you doubt how we are still witnessing today some of that deep suffering within the spirit of man? We've only now begun to see more clearly how what was once just military technology has reshaped our data-driven world, not always for the better, but is this moment of clarity already too far in our past for us to reckon with? Is the attention span and level of discourse within your average technophile already too naive and corrupted of a spirit to engender the appropriate discussions? To some of us it is obvious what has happened to our cultures. We have become fools because of technology. Slaves to the machine. Just as technology re-shaped the battlefield amongst which spear and sword, cavalry and gunpowder, machine gun and armored tank fought it out for territorial power, the escalating speed at which everything from social to political interactions changes with it too, and not always for the better of humanity. This both frightens and excites young and old, rural and urban. It touches the cornerstone of every culture on Earth and tears it asunder. Some are blind to the cycles of how civilizations rise and crumble. Some think it is always improving upward. Over time the truth sets us free from such blind naive visions. The ages unfold before our downcast eyes and we begin to see what surprises laid in wait for us with our own too late rediscovery.

Although I barely remember all of the stories of my Grandpa, my father would tell me one thousand and one stories about him when I was a small lad. My father and I were deeply affected by all these tales from our families past. My father did become an engineer as Grandpa always wanted but I am not so sure it saved him from the same fate my Grandpa had feared. In some ways I am glad my Grandpa died before he could see what my father would truly become. I'll admit it now because dad is no longer alive but it makes me feel ashamed for him. He was enamored with these new engines of society. He could not see where this was eventually taking us right up until the very end. He just wanted to be part of the motions of it all.

As his parents had advised as soon as my father was 16 he started taking classes at the local college. When he obtained some rudimentary degrees he took an apprenticeship at a burgeoning newly formed engine shop which sprouted up just a short 45 minute walk from our home. His parents figured this was the ticket ahead so he would not suffer on the battlefield someday. Become the creator of the devices, not the soldier ordered to do the actual deeds. The inventor of the might. The wise cowards way ahead. The owners could see right away that father had an inquisitive mind and aimed to please. They took note of my fathers ever curious nature as he was always asking questions, always wanting to learn how things worked, and then immediately understanding them when their mysteries were unraveled and explained to his young brain. They began sharing with him some of the more advanced mathematics that it took to ensure that these engines did not outright explode, expressing all the raw power that they could muster to the drivetrain of motion alone, or in the case that they did explode violently, that they did not hurl shrapnels of metal towards the car and passengers. He learned a lot about controlling the swelling pyrotechnics power of nature here. He stayed at this firm for many years for town employers were pillars of the community back in those days. Ensuring that those who are of old age had made enough earnings in their lifetimes that their wives could live their final peaceful years in financial serenity.

Eventually more sophisticated engines came upon us. Father learned all he could. Industry and society promptly adopted these wondrous creations for most everyone was enamored with this newfound technological world. Everyone wanted to learn more, wanted to improve our stock and trade. A time for capital production and making money! Everything began to move faster and more efficiently. Was it any surprise that immediately after the invention of the motor engine preceded War? Man could finally now invent costlier and ghastlier means of mass produced destruction which could be used to trample over the forests, industries, cities and citizens of his foes. In some ancient battles the warrior caste generally regarded certain things like killing women and children and land as dishonorable. Let the women and soil live at least, they must bear our children and fertile fruits. With the new weapons of war, everyone became part of the front line killing fields. Total annihilation, even the truly harmless. Collateral damage inflicted on the benign mass members of a society. They became statistics. Atom bombs wrapped the whole story up in a nice big mushroom cloud shaped bow. My Grandfather knew what these new tools of destruction could achieve. The military industrial complex had created catastrophic devices which could wield an amazing amount of raw power on an enemy with obvious consequences. We think only of the upfront reality of such destruction, never about the long term spirit of it. How it stays with you and your culture forever. It haunts you and your people long after the act is finally forgotten.

My father rarely talked about his contributions to all of this. For sure he was out of the trenches my grandfather and his friends had been relegated to. He was too important. He was too wise. He was one with the machines. We did not see much of him in those days. Beleaguered and chased by the titans of industry he worked most of the time. After the second of the major Wars were finished, the enemies certainly vanquished to mass starvation and dust, the victories declared uniformly in our favor, my father continued his grand work on his brain and life's ambitions. A new and budding corporation in San Jose was to change the rest of world. The Government was turning some of its military funding to home-front consumerist technical pursuits. The liberal mixed-economy managerial bureaucrat takeover of the so called free world. Neo-liberal even. Who needs an everlasting monarchy when you have the Harvard-educated and transistor radios? You can never rid the world of this kind of thinking, it keeps re-spawning with each graduating class. Petty little meddling bureaucrats and technicians have infected the world, beamed from the two Coasts. Fairchild Semiconductor was one of these wondrous new firms that entered into my fathers work life in order to continue the technological fervor within his mind. Silicon and semiconductors were the new revolution that Military funding would bring to the world. During the height of the Cold War my father worked his way up within Raytheon Corporation. They made highfalutin radar systems and drone bombs. These technologies began in the military and then worked their way down into consumer products later on. Multiplex networks of computerized robots which swept dust under your rug. The ability to digitally track anything at anytime anywhere on this globe like a FedEx package. The Technical take-over of the military industrial complex creeped its way into our everyday life. At least my Dad never risked his own neck. Our family was handsomely rewarded for my pops home-front service on the digital age front-lines. I was just a young man when the Cold Wars were all finished. For good the adults said. We all believed them, at least as long as the good times kept rolling forward.

My father was a great technician but he wasn't a great writer. Still he had a passion for it late in life. He seemed to think that he just needed to write and that no one actually needed to read his screeds. He was just happy scribbling away and then feeling angry and spiteful that no one would read or understand what he wrote. Though it all made his mind go to the bughouse just before he died. His stories were somewhat intriguing and his general point as he got older was basically that technology and modernity was a stinker after all and that the good old days were much better than these. Everyone thought he had lost his mind when he started to write that sort of stuff. He kept his job for some time but they stopped giving him any noteworthy assignments. I know what that is like. The family never had much money after that. This was around the time I was graduating elementary school. His writing wasn't even that half bad, I have some of it here with me for reference. I always held on to his papers so I could understand him better. Unwrap the enigma that was my father. Somehow now I believe him. He meant it when he finally turned off of technology and it wasn’t that he had just gone crazy, he knew it best with all he had seen and done for the system. He had a point in the end. A torch I can carry on for him. I do think guilt had wracked his brain on account of working for some evil technology companies too, straight up killing it. What a guy. I can see how that colored his thinking. Perhaps he did pay the price with his own sanity in the end. His heart burst in his sleep on Christmas Eve and we did not open any presents until the following year.

In some sense one could say I was always more a reactionary than a revolutionary. His son, moi, just wanted to live the good life and only knew this one modern life in order to live it. I really did not understand in my youth that technology would come back to bite me in the ass later on. Adults foisted these things on young kids without thinking of the implications. To make matters worse I had grown fond of wanking off in front of the computer screen late at night as any adolescent boy would. What can I say? Good times create weak men. Especially ones lost without father figures, a real mentor to look towards for sage guidance. I was liable to get in trouble spending time in the digital realm away from the analog social space. Animated-GIFs back then, wowzers. I was fond of formatting the computers on display at the Radio Shack at Sears-town Mall too. I was growing to be a petty little digital rebel. Always an artiste' dissident of the technical kind.

I would love to tell you some more music about my grandfather.

I would love to tell you some more music about my father too. . . but where am I exactly? Have I awoke from this snow filled lethargic dream? Let me toss one more log into the flames and we will get back to it.

My childhood almost seems like a dream to me now. An ever moving motion picture. I am a young man again. I can see my father tinkering out in the shop with his motors and electrical equipment. My mother is working in the kitchen with my older brother fixing fresh eggs from the hens for breakfast. We lived a carefree life on this farm, life as it should be, with close neighbors too. Some which delight us, others which we smile at with some scorn. Life was so harmonious back in those early memories before things morphed into what they are today. Things all got worse as the world became one big technological mess. I remember hearing my father towards his end once say out loud at dinner, “Was it a warning Eisenhower gave us? Or was he simply conjuring into being an Omen of the future as it would become?” The Military Industrial Complex. Would it doom the spirit of mankind by turning its brutal technicians thinking inwards towards the soul of its own nation? Did Ike just want to scare the bejesus out of us? It worked. No one questions their powers anymore. Political and Economic Power are the only things even remotely close to it. Technology stands over us all like the spawned Leviathan it has come to be, swallowing up cultures and nations whole cloth.

Finally some more precious memories from my youth. William was a red headed boy up the street with freckles, and his family said prayers at dinner and I liked spending time with them for William also had a little sister Emma which would follow us around and she seemed very fond of me as well. They seemed like a peaceful pious family, some which still humbly existed even back then. Renaissance figures whom once walked among us. Around the other corner from our house was a young man named Corey who lived with his mother and step-father. I could tell his step-father was a stern man and Corey was a very rebellious spirit. It did not work out well. Despite this his step-dad taught us all how to play baseball. Eventually his mom left him too. Family life had begun to crumble further even in my early days.

There was a girl in town named Julia that lived in a grand stone lodging. A home which looked like it had once belonged to the most prosperous family in town. She endeavored to have a private dance for her birthday. Her parents must have agreed. The rooms were dark and regal, beset with burning fireplaces and staircases with delightfully ornamented railings with spirals and curves which beckoned one to keep exploring. A room to one side was filled to the ceiling with books. I was impressed with the grandeur of it all. I had never met this dainty brunette with curls before. She did not go to public school. By evenings end we were dancing and she ended the night bidding me farewell with a kiss and invited me to accompany her to see a nearby play. What fair early tidings for a young man. While not my first kiss it was indeed the best at the time. My first kiss was yet another J in my life. A Jennifer. She was a poor little girl who had just moved to town and had a younger brother who was a cripple. She invited everyone over to her house for a birthday party. It was a small house and we played outside and she dared ask me to give her a kiss hiding under the branches of a towering pine. I did not want to for I was just a young man who knew not the virtues of the fairer sex yet. They all had cooties for all I knew. She fell upon me with a smooch anyways. She cried after I spurned her advances. Ruined her birthday like a real cad. But this Julia, she was another story. I enjoyed her company greatly. We enjoyed that play and we enjoyed each other and held hands during the procession. This was the first and last evening I spent with Julia as we were both about to embark on the next chapter of our adolescent lives, swept away from our little town and our tiny elementary school to higher places in education. Memories, memories, but all sweet and untouched things must eventually be lost like dust in the wind. The times have changed. Now kids seem to be stuck on smartphones and staring at screens instead of interacting and connecting with one another face to face and heart to heart. I miss the good ole days, what else can I say? I have become an old sentimental codger after all. Just like my Granps.

I am sure it pained my father right up until the end watching his children take the youthful life right out of his once gentle bride. My mom. One day while fetching the mail mother and I burst outside and I actually knocked her over. Wrecked quite badly even. All my fault? Or was it that hole in the walkway that my father never had the time to mend? He was always busy working and tinkering on projects at work with seemingly superior mystique than tending to us kids and keeping up with the house. Sign of the coming times? It seems it takes two working parents to survive these days. Something has to give. Mom was a cripple from then on for she had broken her ankle in several places. Life was never as innocent as before. Perhaps this was because my mother was never the same as before. Prior to this incident she was lively, even young and radiant. And after this she was as slow and doleful as a mare. Humans are frail indeed. Forget about ever-lasting life. Can’t we just have one decent life this time?

As long as I could remember I always wanted to be some sort of artist. As long as I could remember I always wanted to be a musician. Like I said earlier I always thought life was like a movie in my mind. Myself being the producer, director and cameraman. I could narrate my way through life and write my own symphony called fate. A concerto made of pure golden destiny. That was right up until I lost my childhood dreams completely. I could tell father had wanted to become a musician at some point in his life too, especially when we played together sitting on the piano bench when I was little. True Artistes! Partners in crime! Perhaps — in the end I became corporate swine just like him. But it was not an easy road to pigs-ville! The industrialized monstrous mama sow of the future of the digital arts! The A-Team of Digital Fruits! A ballad to the future of technical monotony. My how father and I learned to play music together in those early days before he passed too early in life. He barely outlived his father but Grandpa had so many more stories from a longer and slower life before we all moved in with the machines. My father always seemed so burnt out from all those technical ways. He was always franticly thinking. Music was our only one true bond before my father passed away into mere memories.

It comes to me flowing in dreams sometimes. We can rescue man. Mankind. All of Western Humanity by focusing on his humble noble pious ways. A path out of the fake illuminated darkness and into the wondrous true light. I must commit these thoughts to memory so if I ever awake from this madness I can jot them down. Did I really make it to the cabin or am I still close within deaths grip in a snowy grave? Is this all it is? Thoughts? Lost dreams and memories? Distractions upon distractions. Maybe someone will want to read this tale someday. Will I survive to tell it? I awoke so many mornings in the city wanting to write about all of this but that outside life just kept getting in the way of my thoughts. I would have been able to write everything down sooner, younger and more clearly if I had not kept getting interrupted in that infernal urban jungle! These nightmares of an unfinished life and destiny always haunted me there in the city. I kept thinking, would I ever be able to engrave these real thoughts into something so permanent as stone? Would all my dreams of an undistracted life pass on with the death of my mind? Modern urban life is so devoid of real nature. A real nature which in reality is so mystical in its Earthly delights. These cities are places which lack any sort of clear vision or sounds undistracted by brutal harshness. Man has been placed in laboratories which lack any connections with the divinity befitting of his place in the Cosmos. When you lack the ability to witness a natural and real double rainbow which you can see mirror each other end to end on the horizon you have lost something special indeed. It is a sight to behold my friends. The analog reds, greens, yellows and blues that you can barely see in the spectrum hovering purely between the two bows of colorful iridescent arches completing natures skyline. The concealed layers between purple and ultraviolet. I swear I can see some of the hidden colors of the spectrum when I witness a true double rainbow from the mountain summit above the fog in the ever falling light. Become a man who passes through the narrow gate my son in order to see this newly minted ever shining bow. For it is child-like-men who constantly use the broad door of the masses whom refuse to see that they are missing out on what is right in front of them. They refuse to acknowledge what is obscuring the real natural world around us. We have built skyscrapers to replace Gods which only serve to corral and box us in. It is time to write the next chapters in life, the rest of the great book of mankind. The story of a man who breaks free. It is his humble living which keeps him protected from the evils of our day. Stay small not too large is the answer. The story of a man who prides himself on being noble when in reality he is just poor. Poverty almost keeps you pious sometimes my friends. The Amish do not want to be noticed, so stop noticing them. Whereas some of those with Zion and starlights in their eyes tend to only care about power, money and fame as they try to infect all of us with it, they are lost to the spirit of the future. They are caught up with the times. Was it all real? Was it ever even divine? A candle which used to burn so brightly now just flickers in the wind. The flame is extinguished and the dream has ended.