Lullaby

Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound.

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When they had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving them an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave.
Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy.

I don't know the difference between what I want and what I'm trained to want.
I can't tell what I really want and what I've been tricked into wanting.
What I'm talking about is free will. Do we have it, or does God dictate and script everything we do and say and want? Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born? Do I have it, or is my mind under the control of Helen's spell?

I tell him, I've missed him, too. I love him, too. I tell him, I'm okay.
I say, I don't know what to do. I say, but it's all going to be okay.
After that, I just listen. I wait for him to stop crying so I can say I'm sorry.

All that work and love and effort and time, my life, wasted. Everything I hoped would outlive me I've ruined.

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

His face and hands are smeared red with blood. The devil's face. His shattered blond hair sticks up from his forehead, stiff and red as devil's horns. His red goatee. In all this red, his eyes are white. It's not the white of white flags, surrender. It's the white of hard-boiled eggs, crippled chickens in battery cages, factory farm misery and suffering and death.

Imagine if the Chicago fire of 1871 had gone on for six months before anyone noticed. Imagine if the Johnstown flood in 1889 or the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had lasted six months, a year, two years, before anyone paid attention to it.
Building with wood, building on fault lines, building on floodplains, each era creates its own «natural» disasters.
Imagine a flood of dark green in the downtown of any major city, the office and condo towers submerged inch by inch.

Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job.

I say, the cure for having too much power is not to get more power.