easter

I am in Montevideo Uruguay and just now relented to use the capital “I” for the beginning of this essay. It has been raining and i’ve cooked evening/morning buckets of chicken over the last two days - an expense that was vastly returned for the simple salubrious effect on others faced with a dislocated holiday - fuck hunger of all kinds. Dark is descending in more ways than i’m comfortable with - aging - physically, emotionally, spiritually  .  . . like who the hell ain’t. A version of “Jack of Hearts” is playing after having posted “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” on fb just to create the illusion of continuity for it’s opening line “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez And it’s Eastertide too .  .” My oldest brother did not reply to my request to explain to our ma for my having been inexplicably interrupted on an international call - a pain disproportionate to the less than a paragraph of sentences we’ve exchanged in the past decade - and he is a standup guy you are as lucky to have in your world as I am unfortunate to not - still I am happy enough to want to conjure thoughts lucid enough to share with strangers in hopes of assuaging common enough grief. Is that the meaning of Easter - an arising of intent devoid of self-interest, seeking the diminution of another’s pain for no other reason than the outside chance that helping another might cancel out parts of one’s own grief in a twisted emotional equation? From what i can tell - there’s no telling, and it don’t matter even if you did like trying to codify the mastery of magic through the same effort to preserve the unpreservable that religion expands so much of your hard-earned offerings proving the same to you.

Food and the last supper for Jesus seem to echo through this easter, like how could something so simple and decent as sharing food be turned into the greatest betrayal in the history of our species? Even more importantly, how to reclaim the decency of something so pure as giving to another nourishment can once again become a hijacked sacrament of a coterie of clerics coveting the rumps of the young? that is a question, not for the most decent pope  mankind has seen in the past 400 years, but for the gazillions supporting extrajudicial killings and the poisoning of the cornucopia that had once been human heritage, but has now become little more than a scrap off some meat slicer in a perverse existential delicatessen. How can what had been one of the bravest acts in human history the knowing ennobling of one’s own death been hijacked and made into the commercial exploitation for greater and more deadly weapons of death and destruction? Again more importantly, how do we as thinking, cogent animated life seize our absolute prerogative back from a handful of ciphers whose demonstrated interest in existence is little more than a side bet on a weekend bacchanal between some private island in Greece and a hot water grotto in some private airfield in the former Soviet Republic - as though the thought or event is fictional? We humans a far more than a skid mark on some trust fund baby’s barely conscious trajectory from an anointed birth to a desolate death enabled by a silicon chip once hailed like Jesus as the savior from our collective misery only to be crucified on the cross of some hater’s dollar sign.

I just spilt the last glass of wine from a box and spent an hour expunging what cannot be expunged - the look of pity from those who smell drunkenness from sober schnozes, and i’m oddly more than okay with the smug judgement, for it so closely corresponds to issues of belonging within a family that has fought for decades to expunge my, wrongness from the rightness that at some point replaced the warmth of hearth in my home of origin. And again, you must know this tribe i speak of is as decent a collection of characters as you’ll find in any congregation, coven or quarter on the planet - how sad is that? The music haunt is just now playing a song my youngest brother swears to be his favorite “Brother where art thou” though the star of the film commands a $345,000 fee for a sit-down dinner in his company, and i wonder WTF - i’ve known many, but none i’d spend that much to amuse, or be amused by = 2 1/2 paragraphs into a holiday essay - always the best, but why? What do i have to share now anymore than another time that might be worthwhile? My ma, who my oldest brother has pledged his troth to protect from my reprehensible ways is an atheist, by protestation but from history is closely affiliated with the holiday “easter” - why is that? Not in the hypercritical pursuit of affixing blame on an aged dying spirit, but in the sense of wonderment as to why a secular humanist would have gone through the trouble of collecting local boys out of the reactionary city we lived in in early 1960s Orange County which California at that time and this represented while squiring said pre-pubescent man-children through the remnants of Mercado Central of Boyle Heights in the city of “El Pueble de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio Porciuncula” on Easter day? - don’t look at me, I have no clue.

I do know that 50 years later my same parent pulled my then wife into much needed pecuniary service of painting the desert home of same said atheist parent on the same ostensibly unrelated holiday, and participating in a excoriating donnybrook fraught with recrimination and specific defect which only my acquiescence could satisfy, and 60 years later i, in an unfamiliar South American town would attempt to recreate a “lost weekend” again from another magical “resurrection day” wherein my blotto brother bailed on a family gathering in which my “reaction formation” was to explore spontaneous autonomy with 14 or so other strangers by securing frozen duck and fabricating an extemporaneous Easter - a polite euphemism for a holiday i’m becoming too self-consciously afraid to attribute any scent of synchronicity, maybe always have been, but now feel free enough to flaunt, sort of like piggybacking my post celebrity confession on the back of an aged holiday still potent enough to elicit solidarity for an Israel devoid of conscience with its own precedence - i will employ any device i can find to leverage or to levitate the ignorant speciousness that allows one to believe killing another creature will satisfy a blood lust born of fear of one’s interior. I’m sorry my blood relative feels so strongly that he would not release me from my  anxiety of solitude enough to say, “I will share your reality with our mother,” or the very real need for me to release myself from my own bondage. It is not my brother who enslaves me with hated, harsh emotions but myself. If anything the knowledge that my brother suffers such hurt as to want me to be alone is cause enough to pray for his release, and therefor my own? Correct me please.

I cannot think of a more forlorn position from which to advocate than a drunken essay on a sacred holiday alone in a foreign nation exculpating one’s weaknesses with a timid enough audience to lurk rather than correct - laugh you shy people, for it takes one to know one, and i laugh harder at myself than i could ever muster for your reticence. My genuine hope is that for anyone feeling lost on a day representing the rejuvenation of all lost things - take heart. We may perish - your earnest hope for protection and fair advancement for your children and their children’s children may be thwarted before your very eyes - yet be enormously worthwhile for their having witnessed the love on your face as they suffer untold horrors you could not avert for all your best hopes and efforts. And even better, that in their loneliest despair your creative effort to share with them the finer aspects of human existence allowed them to imagine clearly your loving desire into some intangible, inarticulate void which they then might pass along next to nothing to those closest to them in a an ineffable moment of non-awareness - yeah easter is a really neat time and yes a matter of fact Edwin Hawkin’s Singers is singing “Oh Happy Day” on my non synchronistic Apple synchronistic “shuffle”, and i could give a shit - 5 paragraphs of semi-cogent thinking on a sacred holiday alone and without prospects is not self-indulgent, complacent, nor nihilistic at a time when it seem all else is - real or imagined lost. What a lucky fuck i am to spend my twilight hours in a empty place trying to mine sense as my grand parent mined material in a world then yet incapable of ravaging what aught not be .  . with love for your higher self from me and my lower .  .