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A Catherine May 2013
There’s a constant, quiet fump fump fump coming from the space where my muscles fold into my flesh.  I feel it along my arms and chest, underneath my cheeks.  The pattering wraps around my thighs and crawls across my stomach.  It’s desynchronized; it’s chaotic.  It makes my skin feel as though it’s stretched just too tightly across my insides.  And the fump fump fump speeds up.  My skin is like tissue paper, and as the rhythm reaches a frenzied pitch, it begins to tear from within.  Out of my forearm appears the slimmest, black appendage.  It slips through like a straw through the lid of a cup.  I lift the hem of my shirt and a fissure alongside my navel reveals a single wing beating frantically.  Panic twists like ivy towards my throat as more splits open in my skin and the existing tears grow wider, but more than that - I am alive.  I take one last great gasp of air, reveling in that feeling of life - that electricity that sparks its way through every cell in my body – and my skin loses the last of its papery integrity and ten thousand butterflies hurl themselves out into the world.  Each wing is unfurled completely and the fump fump fump is now a chorus of twenty thousand delicate membranes embracing freedom.  The insects push at their new boundaries and fly, scattered, to the long lost corners of the universe.  And as the last spark flutters away from the epicenter, that place where I once had a body finally finds the silence.  The stillness.   And where I once had eyes, I close them.  When they open once more, I am bathed in the sun.  I am stretched across a leaf.  I am fanning my wings.
A Simillacrum Jun 2018
The more I think about it, maybe the world is black & white.
People like to talk about ethical or moral grays. We romanticize the grays. It's in the theater. It's on Hulu. It's in advertising. It's carried in on radio waves. There's no escaping the idea that the purposefully vague person, the all too open mind, is the mind for which we strive.

It's my thought that all this focus on the subjective experience by the collective whole has desynchronized us from our base understanding of "right" and "wrong" as it applies to the entire human experience. Excuse me for saying so, but isn't the wanton use of subjective justice exactly how we've arrived at this point of contention? And it's no accident.

They, as in those in positions of ultimate power, who guard the same systems which govern our rules, guide our perception of reality, and drive our social development patterns, fight to maintain this status quo where we've forgotten the absolute in favor of an abstract, more easily marketable humanity. Marketable, hell, palatable is more like it. The fast and righteous adherence to the exponential goodness of humankind is a hard sell. And what is good? What is goodness? Goodliness?

It's nothing religious, but everything holy about our time on a blessed earth as creatures of no meager consciousness. It's the ability to understand and apply unwavering protection to the weak and destitute, and the wisdom to serve justice upon those who would create and maintain a kingdom of opulence in towers above their impoverished, above their uneducated, above their addicted, above their abused, above their loyal peasantry.

The more I think about it, the more I understand why objectivity has fallen out of fashion. Political parties and the grassroots movements that support their platforms are fighting and infighting within the confines of an obsolete construction. It's up to us. The youth. The movers and shakers.

Those of us who have the mobility, the determination, the means, and the conviction to make goodness work. Those of us able to stand up off the couch and volunteer in the community. The more I think about it, the more I'd rather play Overwatch.
I could have sworn there was a time when Alex Jones didn't believe in subterranean lizard people.

— The End —