On Being Yourself

 

There's this thing that seems to happen when people get older and it really irritates me. They see their mortality real and near and they try to pretend all they've done their entire lives was a mistake, some turn to religion, some hide in drink, some try to rewrite their own personal history. Over and over it happens, they reject all they've done in order to stave off death, to forget who they were and become what others think they should be.

Just in case.

They are terrified of dying, of no longer Being, of Hell...Of oblivion...Of the grave. 

Basic science tells us that energy cannot be destroyed, merely changed. As walking talking pools of energy we do not vanish, we become something else. Perhaps it's one of those 'Shadows' people see on the myriad of 'Ghost Buster' shows  on every other channel, perhaps they become a part of the Earth, returning to our Mother what we took from Her in life...I don't know and anybody who says they do is lying.

It's what historians do best. They lie. They tell you fairy tales and insist you give them money or presents for those lies and call it the 'Will of God'. 

Greed. 

They are the absence of 'Being'. They are merely existing by being parasites on those who fear death. And as an aid to the late Oral Roberts I can tell you being a parasite is good business.

To be alive is to accept yourself, the good, bad and ugly. Trust me, I wish I could forget the entire decade of the 80s...I drank and lived in a constant fog of drugs for ten years until in September of 89 I entered rehab and stayed clean and sober since. I still have the memories of all the wrong I did, to myself and those around me, I wish I didn't.

But it was a part of who I am, who I've become and not going to change because 'It's expected'. 

I've lived through those fears most artists have: The losing of my sight (Working on it), contracting a flesh eating disease in my drawing arm that ate all the way to the bone in some places, severing veins and confounding doctors who worked to save my arm...They did and now only an incredibly scarred up arm is there. And now the final blow: My lungs are going and it's all my fault.

I did it. 

I accept it. I've lived longer than most people expected anyway. Now I have one more thing to do and it's a doozy.

So that's why I've been away for a while. I've been fighting the fight of my life. I am not afraid of death, I'm not going to betray my life and my Mother by pretending my life never existed. I am who I am.

 As an artist and a writer I've fulfilled my every dream, I've finally reached a point in my art that I'm satisfied with my art but never finished with it, there's still so much left to learn, to do.

We are all of the Earth, we have the same Mother, She who has fed us when we're hungry, clothed us when we were cold, comforted us when we were afraid. We will not be able to travel the stars, the space station orbiting the planet has showed us that we aren't built for no gravity...Or Earth's gravity, anyway. Our immune system closes down, we lose bone density and our basic DNA changes...We'll have to re-engineer the human body in order to make space travel a reality, especially if it takes more than a year to get where we want to be.

We are the Earth, She is us and that should be enough of a reason to solve our ecology problem or we really will be living on a dead planet, or a few of us will, anyway.

Now I'm going to work on something to help the planet, to help those who are going through what I've gone through to realize it's okay to screw up, it's okay to stand apart from the crowd, that being 'Different' is what humanity is all about.

 There's more coming. I'll share the art and ideas as soon as I can scan them in. 

Until then, be different. 

Be yourself. 

Screw the fear and embrace life and death. The only other thing is to live in the sheer terror of what happens next...I prefer to think of that step as a journey to the true unknown.

'Cause I have no idea what it is.