Waiting for the Miracle
by Richard R. Barron
I find myself on the front deck again, taking aim at the blue sky. If I shoot it down, it will fall all around me, and I can wrap myself up in its’ blueness.
The sun would look on in black-and-white contempt, though only for a moment. The sun’s got bigger, smellier fish to fry.
The blueness stays out of reach, though.
The last 3000 leaves on my Shumard oak tree laugh at me in the stout south breeze. I expect the punch line that has them so amused isn’t as funny as they think it is. Maybe it’s just, “He’ll have to rake us up next week.”
Ha ha, leaves.
My Chihuahua suns herself on the deck, while I poach all the shade for myself. I lean back in my canvas camp chair, and begin to feel that familiar, welcome, dizzy-ish blob of slower thought toward the back of my head.
I’m glad to be getting sleepy, and glad to be warm, quiet, healthy, safe. Maybe if I close my eyes…
Then suddenly, as I wrote those very words, the joker card I was using as a bookmark flew out of my notebook into the yard, and I was as suddenly sure that it all – the sky, the leaves, the wind, the sun, the very day – was all laughing at me.
To the Voiceless: There is Hope
by Richard R. Barron
My problem with most people isn’t that they are hateful douchebags (though that may be a problem), but that they are so unimaginative and boring.
I looked at someone’s blogger.com blog this morning, and blogger.com features a “Next Blog >” link at the top of the page. The link sends you to a random blog in the same genré as the previous one. Since the first blog I saw was a family blog, I was directed to more family blogs, which were, quite honestly, terrible. They were littered with bad photography, filled with million-times-a-day clichés, and most importantly, showed no originality or imagination whatsoever.
How do my blogs stack up? I may be a weirdo and a dick, but at least I show some imagination once in a while.
I know these people imagine things. The trouble is that they imagine what they are told to imagine, mostly by corporate America, bad television, and their equally unimaginative parents.
Next I looked at some pictures of “The Bean” in Chicago. It was crowded, so there were many people in these images. What galled me was that they were all posing for photos, and none of them, none of them, were just being themselves.
Maybe I’m asking too much of the masses. Maybe sentience is a rarer and more elegant gift than the masses are willing to give themselves. I think people are capable of creativity, but are mostly afraid of it. Afraid of judgement. Afraid of being alone. Afraid of risk.
“Alas for those that never sing/But die with all their music in them.” ~Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Voiceless.
“Alas, who among us will shine these wretched turds?” -Richard R. Barron’s Goons, All Goons.
But in disappointment also comes hope. In 1979, a friend wrote in his journal, “All is not lost, only misplaced.” Maybe I am blinded by my misanthropy and have become too dismissive of people. Most people’s mediocrity is due to their circumstances, yet they have the power to become great.
If you feel stifled by mediocrity, consider this: be creative. It may be as simple as that. I recommend starting with a pen and paper. Writing in my journals, nothing inspired me quite as much as bringing home a new spiral notebook. Those blank pages were already written, and were just waiting from me to make the words visible.
