The decline happened so fast. Holding my breath, it’s August. For some reason it’s especially hard to not feel like I’m reliving last year again. Like a film superimposed, the motions of this year playing in step with last year. Some times I still feel like I don’t know when I am. The memories and now seem both foreign and I just wish there was ground I could find that would make sense of either or both. Maybe ground that itself could become familiar and comforting. Ground I could rest my cheek, cool against my face, calming and home.

When will the longing for the impossible stop?

This past week at work I had the surreal experience of overhearing a conversation between two folks on the more technical side of the company discussing 2 Daniel, specifically Nebachadnezzer and how it relates to some current issue. I admit I didn’t listen too hard. I’ve chosen occultist atheism with a profound appreciation and fascination in myth, religion, and philosophy, but am somewhat allergic to claimed authority. I think that’s what surprises me so much is that in our current technocracy there is this tension of rebellion and authority; a rejection of authority that serves all people, an authority based only on who can control what.

To take the translation of millennia old recitation of dream interpretation and apply this to any current moment seems absurd. While certainly I believe that our stories inform subsequent moments, why this one, this translation, this moment? Is it any more authority than a Rolling Stone article from 1973, where my eyes fall upon the words of Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote “Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 AM. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn . . . out here at the far end of Geary Street: This is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America.” His ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in ’72” may be no less prophetic than anything Daniel wrote.

I never had a guru, but have listened to a few. For better or worse, I conjured and cultivated my own parental forces internal to guide me, and when in doubt used the counsel of close associates to mirror my best inner guidance. As pieces of Jon slipped away as the cancer caught fire I was left without my greatest mirror. Not that he was a Rogerian sounding board, but that I could always count on a philosophical reflection — dare I invoke 2 Corinthians without irony? A ‘glass darkly’ we may then see face to face.

I find it impossible to believe in a demiurge or greater being that has orchestrated any of this that desires or deserves any thought or mention. If there is anything, or machine elves beyond our unaltered senses, they must pay us no more mind than my gut biome does to me. Our fates may be interconnected but care not about whether the stop light changes in my favor, or if someone who means the world to me is torn apart from the inside out. There is nothing but the tricks of our own minds, and the manipulations of others, to convince the most cold and technical of something supernatural to invoke.

I believe whatever is or can be manifest relies on what our minds create. Magic and prayer are our desires and we see what we are open to seeing. It’s not that I say “there is no God” I say that there is nothing there unless you say so. Your choice to give name to an experience or desire makes it so, and nakedly, authority is not something someone has but something that has been given. There is no intrinsic authority.

But I wish there was. Even the authority inside of me, which is a product of the insidious individualism of the white patriarchal 20^th century America, is suspect. It’s what I know. It’s hard to reconcile this longing with the knowledge that we, incredible, amazing meat sacks can know wonders but not prove them. That faith is an evolutionary adaptation to perpetuate the species when everything else proves against it. I am in awe of those who have named their God or gods and find comfort and rest in their stories, but also in frustration when those same convictions blind them to both the awe and the humanity of others.

I guess the hardest thing these days is to place my face against the cold earth and then hold my breath and listen. The hardest thing is to be an author, to consciously create the world and assert and decide and risk, because time will drag you forward either way. The movie plays, overlaid. It’s this year, on the lawn at the Woodland Park Zoo for The Mountain Goats and The Hold Steady. Warm sunny day overlaid warm sunny day. Ghostly image, seated, in a chair that isn’t there, a deep breath, but only half of the chest raises. Shirt hangs loose over wasted shoulders. So many outdoor concerts, can he hear the chorus if I sing along? “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”