The End of The World

I lay in bed this morning for I don't know how long, before deciding to get up, prompted by the need to urinate, finally looking for a clock to see what time it is. Yesterday there was a problem with the emergency lighting and, because of this all the electrical breakers were reset; my clock is angrily blinking some worthless time, shouting at me to be reset it. It really doesn't matter, as I hadn't reset it for standard time and it has had a time an hour wrong since. I don't know why I am so obsessed with the time this morning; I have nothing of any consequence that needs attention this morning, early or otherwise. A friend once gave me a watch, after watching me constantly pulling out my PDA to get the time; he gave it to me, but he also admonished me that those who live by the watch, die by the watch. I am not the only one obsessed with time; The Millenarists, a brand of Christianity, have been watching the world for signs that will proceed the end times. Watching and waiting for the rapture, that time when God raise the faithful, as he did Ezekiel, from this Wicked World, leaving the rest of us for a one thousand year celebration of peace and prosperity before he unchains Satan to give us our just deserts. I don't know what the faithful will be doing at the time; I probably won't be among them Every new crisis brings new books, the modern equivalents of the man who carries the sandwich board, up and down the street, with the warning Repent, for the end is near, pointing out all the signs of the End Times. Like all of us they are looking for some meaning in the world, some justification for the inequities we daily observe in the world. I apologize for this probable misrepresentation of the Rapture; I was never taught about the rapture in my Sunday school and the Bible seems to be particularly opaque of meaning on the subject, as all the references I can find on my Laptop. Anybody is welcome to set me straight. In my Sunday school we spent our time singing Jesus, Loves the Little Children, and being told that we were going to heaven when we died, while being, for the most part, silent about those who are headed the other way, it was just assumed that we weren't among them. The shouting of the clock forces me to feel around in the dark, seeking out my iPod Nano to find the time. I am startled about how much light it put outs; its display could be used as a flashlight and I hope that I don't wake Louis, one of the other residents of the Homeless Shelter where I reside, for surly he will be ill-tempered if I have wake him this early. I really don't hate anyone, but there are people who I have found, from hard experience, it is not good for me to be around. Certainly, there is a growing list of people who don't care to be around me, so fair is fair. I find it hard to believe that God is any less under B. W. Reed January 3 & 4, 2008

The End of The World

standing then I am. Maybe the punishment for an unbeliever is to actually live in a Godless World; maybe there are some people God doesn't care to be around either. Mostly I try to believe that everyone really is doing there best, but have been damaged by World, but not without possibility of redemption. I hate the thought of someone being cursed for an eternity just because the World has shown them the wrong face. I think that God knows this too and makes accommodations; he has an understanding born of unconditional Love unlike the rest of us. Why do we sit away from the world, in our collective Churches, sounding off against the sinners, those who are at best confused and mistaken because of what the world has done to them, when we, taking responsibility for the world we collectively built, could each do our part to rebuild a better World. The Kingdom of God surrounds us, if we build it. It is 6 AM almost exactly and maybe I should just learn to trust my bladder as it has shown me to be a faithful timekeeper in matters of when I should get up. As I rise from my bed I overbalance and find myself falling into sitting position on Louis's Bed, hearing him yell What the Fuck, and at least my fear of waking him is over; he's awake and I have to deal with the consequences. Picking myself up, I try to leave the bedroom, dormitory or barracks would me more appropriate the normal double beds have been replaced by surplus jail beds (homey) as quietly as possible, although this seems kind of pointless now that I have roused Louis, to the bathroom to quiet my demanding bladder. Out of the bathroom, my bladder quiescent, I move towards the living room. Earl has gotten out of bed while I was in the bathroom and he has started the coffee. I ask him if he has a cigarette and he offers me two, one for later. (Later, I find that he has laid two more by Laptop; he is new and sooner or later he will decide that he can't afford to keep me smoking, but I am appreciative for the gesture now.) We both go upstairs to smoke silently together, a silence broken only by his remarks about the weather it just started snowing and my terse responses. All this motion has been a backdrop to my thoughts which has been trying to decide if the messages I sent to a friend, or so I hope she considers herself to be, yesterday were ill advised or justified. I had finally crafted the first message before getting on the Internet and, though I knew that it could be possibly explosive, but I tried hard to keep it within the envelope that would allow not lead to a complete breakdown in communication. All might have been well if I had left it at that, but waiting for me as I connected to the Internet was a message from her. My reaction wasn't immediate, but needed time ferment
B. W. Reed January 3 & 4, 2008

The End of The World

in my mind before an ill advised could burst forth, like an over pressurized pressure cooker it exploded out. I go back down stairs and fill up my coffee cup again before going back into the barracks to pick up my Laptop and my medication, the Laptop to write and the medication to quell this growing anxious fear that has invaded my mind. Louis asks me if I'm all right and so it seems my fall onto his bed did not anger him; good, at least this has gone right, he is not angry with my sudden interruption of his sleep. My friend and I have been in some sort of strange dance one that sometimes reminds of a Tarantella, an Italian dance once blamed the death of the dancers and has a poisonous spider named after it in consequence for about two years now, which has been reduced to anonymous messages through a web site. After her first document post, I was sure it was her. After her second, I had no doubts. The anonymity was her idea, which I quickly ruined by reasoning who this new Internet friend was. Of course I could have been wrong, but she quickly removed the anonymous mask, admitting her identity. It is her someone else performing a skillful simulacrum of her. I think my discovery caused her to contemplate breaking the connection, but for some reason she persisted for these two weeks, until, I fear, now. I go back out to the kitchen, while Earl drinks coffee and watches TV. I settle into the kitchen to start writing this, unsure of what I am going to say, only that it will be called The End of the World. I am really not sure what the end of the world means; the end of whose world? It seems to me that my world has ended a number of times, each time it just gets replaced by another. Though, it could be said that we Love each other, I think that this means two different things to each of us. I am always thinking that this means that we should at least be friends and do things together as friends do, while I think it means that it is her duty to save me from being among the unfaithful Christians before the quickly approaching end times. (This probably captures the situation wrongly, but I will let it stand now for brevity.) Her message upset for two reasons. First, her message seemed to assume that my feelings for had somehow changed and therefore it was now safe for her to have some distant contact with me again. To me it seemed that we had been a party to two separate communications, which I think is the problems with most modern forms of communication; if we had spoken in person she would have known of my feelings and known that it was not safe to have contact yet. I guess this should not have surprised me this much, because I had sent a message to her recently saying that we were involved in a serial monologue , and the fact that she had not responded to this, letting it stand, really just proved my point.
B. W. Reed January 3 & 4, 2008

The End of The World

The idea that parts of our lives could have a sound track started out as a joke. The sound track of the life of a depressive is The Thrill is Gone by BB King. Somewhere in the two years of our dance, I discovered that it had a sound track consisting of more than just one song. I started creating lists of songs some of which have survived as iTunes play lists that for some reason, the lyrics or the song title, seem to be appropriate. During the penultimate paragraph above you should have been listening to Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin), for the title. (If your ears can multi-task you can also listen to It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine (R.E.M.), also for the title. (I promise that there will be only one more mention of the sound track and that only because it is one of the reasons I started writing this mess.) The second reason her message upset me was that during the course of the message she referred to other people who have been advising her to have no contact with me. Of course, I knew these unnamed individuals existed and even have some idea of some of the individuals involved, but it hurt a little, okay more than a little, that she would see the need to remind me of this uncomfortable fact. I am currently away from the Internet, and so I don't know the exact words of the second message. What follows is based upon my biased emotional memory of what I remember as a message that probably caused more hurt than I would have intended had I not been in a rush to let my hurt be known. I am fairly certain that the content went quite some distance past the point of any expectation that I will ever here from her gain, other than those uncomfortable times when we accidentally catch sight of each other, our dance is probably over. I have been calling her Spider, a nickname she chose, explaining that she felt that she had lured me with her spider's web. When, in a note she suggested that the only reply she would accept was an answer on my public web site, it seemed to be a name that she and few others would recognize, it gave her a bit of anonymity. After that reply, which I now regret as I had written it too hastily, Spider became a character in my writing. Her message referenced a dream I had detailed on my public web site, which, in part, discussed the experience, two nights ago, that Spider's Web had finally dissolved into airy nothingness, leaving me wondering if anything, but emptiness and alienation, a document that had not been meant for whatever reading public I have. It was a metaphoric way of saying that I had given up, not my Love for her, but the possibility that anything would ever come of this love. This would not have met as much as it did, had not Spider chosen the exact time I was uploading this dream to resume contact anonymously, which she saw as a sign of a spiritual connection. She sees signs in everything and I have begun, under her influence, see signs everywhere also. I had finally allowed the Web to dissolve in my mind and suddenly
B. W. Reed January 3 & 4, 2008

The End of The World

here the spider appears again in another guise. Maybe, I allowed myself to hope, there was hope for us yet. Everything seemed to be going well and, as she remarked, we were meeting each other again in a new guise; I felt hope, real hope, again. That is, until her message, her message spoke to me of a World that was destined to continue in the same unsatisfying path I have found myself on. The second message I sent her was written under the influence of my anger at myself that I had allowed myself to hope again. In the message I asked her to recognize that her actions were the result of fear, as are mine, and the fear of the loss of her pride if others were to discover that she is not the perfect person she tries to project. I asked her to admit her imperfections and forgive them; that is the real moral, the meat, of the New Testament. I told her that I loved because of the imperfections she had shown me and accepted. I asked her to follow her heart, which comes from God. Finally I told that the Web, which good have been seen as a safety net, was in truth dissolved. I said some many things that I know she will find painful. For all this, I Love her in some crazy mixed up way and would not hold back the painful things I had to say because of that Love. I doubt I will hear from her again and I blame myself. I must learn to forgive myself, for I can't say I expect her forgiveness. We look for sign; as I said, earlier, we all seek some justification for the inequities we daily observe in the world. We look for signs and the day I sent the objectionable second message I saw two signs. First, my iPod decided to start playing a song from our play list, on it's own, Catch My Fall (Billy Idol) the lyrics If I should stumble; Catch my fall, she will know why this is on the play list and I pick up a magnetic poetry piece off of the side walk that says love. You need more faith than I am currently capable of to see these signs as anything other than a confusing coincidence. My signs always disagreed with hers; we see what we want to see. This is how the World ends, one piece, one person at a time. It is the next day and outside we have had the first major snowfall of the winter. Everything is clean and white and, though it took me time to realize it, this is what I appreciate about winter. Winter offers us a new world as the old one is dying; one world ends and another starts. My life is in its season of winter; who will I be in this new promised world?

B. W. Reed

January 3 & 4, 2008