KEN HOLDS NOTHING BACK

Everything is either suction or pressure. There is nothing else. Oh sure, they want you to believe it’s more complicated than that, but that’s just mind games they’ve created to trick you into surrendering your power and reason. I’d ought to know, I used to be a college professor. Though I never wrote my dissertation, I completed all the course work for a doctorate. But those are bitter memories, and I want to move onward and upward, toward the light of freedom in the present moment.

Suction draws us backwards, and pressure propels us forward. Sometimes you need both, other times only one. Hence the spiral, the form that describes all movement that’s not zigging or zagging. The famous Fibonacci sequence is but one form of spiral. The Golden Rectangle, the Pentagram of Opposite Resonance, the Four Sequences of Adequate Compensation, the Center of Nothing and Everything…these are the tools that should be taught in our schools from day one! But how many know of them?

Sometimes I feel like I should take drastic action, like one of those guys who barricades himself in a government office and claims to have a bomb strapped to his waist. If not me, who? If not now, when? If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

If I think it through, I can see that nothing more will come from such actions than me losing what little freedom I have left. I’ll be institutionalized, a kindly nurse handing me my pills every morning and watching carefully that I take them. “Open up,” she coos after I swallow, and then examines my mouth with a flashlight.

Some nights I lie awake and think I hear a humming sound coming from my window. Could it be a flying saucer hovering nearby? No, it’s simply the neighbor’s air conditioner. How I wish that it were a saucer, coming to take me home. Back to where I really belong, and have always belonged. This life of mine is a tragic mistake, a sick joke.

Something’s got to give, right? Maybe not. Maybe nothing changes for the better. Maybe the future is just more of the same, only gradually worse. If that’s the case, I don’t want to hang around. Maybe I should buy one of those AR-15 rifles they sell at Wal-Mart and go down in a blaze of glory. Come and get me coppers! Top of the world, Ma!

The thing I like about Wal-Mart is that nobody’s any better than anybody else. It’s a level playing field. We’re all just Wal-Mart shoppers. The people that work there are nobody special. You’ll find a sixty year-old man who used to own the hardware store in town that was put out of business after Wal-Mart came and undercut with lower prices on the only items that were making him any money. After his store failed, which had been in business for three generations, he went to work for Wal-Mart, making minimum wage, and being supervised by a nineteen-year-old management trainee who didn’t know anything about hardware, or how to fix things. It’s the perfect metaphor for America. And here I am, who paid graduate school tuition and almost broke even by teaching undergraduate introductory courses to nineteen-year-olds who had the attention span of gnats, sitting at the snack bar, wondering why I’m still sucking air.

Wal-Mart is all of us. It’s the greeter who hands us our cart and wears a blue name badge that reads “Hi, I’m Carl!” Carl would rather be here than sitting in front of the TV at home, watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island. Besides, he’s already seen every episode twice.

I’m too intelligent to watch TV. It doesn’t hold my attention. TV shows are made for people at the mental age of twelve. If you have the mental age of a seven or eight-year-old, then you might find TV show challenging and somewhat profound. If you can actually read and write, you’re out of luck. As TV star Carol Burnett once said in reply to those who criticize the low level of TV, “Television is for shut-ins, for people in nursing homes and hospitals. If you’re not in that group, then why aren’t you out doing something productive with your health and intelligence?”

She did all right for herself. I’d like to think I still have time to break through whatever has been holding me back. I was not put here by mistake. There is a plan for me, though it’s unfolding so slowly I haven’t been able to notice, much less learn much about it.

Is it cold in here or is it just me? I’m covered in goose bumps. One moment I’m freezing, the next I’m sweating buckets. I’m worried that it’s a electromagnetic ray they’re beaming from satellites. It’s the way they brought down the World Trade Center in 9/11. Dustification. Doctor Judy Wood. Read about it. The people who jumped out the windows were in agony from the ray. We’ve had this technology since the 1990’s. I don’t know why they would be targeting me, but then there are a lot of things a guy like me isn’t privy to. I don’t travel in the right circles.