Love is coming to us all.

So I was thinking about doing some writing for a while now and finally i have managed to actually get down to it. Feeling low the past few days. Real low. Darkness, despair, drinking hoping that somehow that fleeing feeling of exuberance will cure what ails me. That ingesting something and feeling like shit and then doing it over the next day thinking it will be the cure. To fight fire with fire. So here I am at 5am just pondering what to do. What exactly is wrong. Can't seem to see through the haze. Got on this dating site and the hardest part of explaining who I am and what I'm doing. What am I doing? I really don't know. It saddens me this feeling. This utter detachment I have from myself. A feeling that I don't really care what happens. It reminds me somewhat of something Shelby foote said about Lincoln 'that he could remove himself from himself as if he were looking at himself.' I think in some ways thats how I feel. A lack of ego, of self-esteem, of pride. Something went wrong somewhere down the line and the shit just seems to come piling in. Sitting, stagnating, getting fat, old, useless. Eroding all my sense of dignity and self-worth, drowning myself in rivers of whiskey and malt liquor to dull everything. The pain, of what? Its not even fun anymore and the taste is fleeting. Feel disgusting and bloated every day and its just getting worse. Seems like everyone around me has confidence and know what they want but I just fall behind. Watching everything pass me by day by day not really knowing why. Why I live like this, why I don't want to move to do something with myself, to get out to live. Letting everything go to where I make an absolute fool of myself for no damn reason. Drinking just takes from you, at first it seems to give you things but then it takes. Until you don't know why your'e doing it but you still can't stop. Every day you wake up and you just don't want to. And people who know you ask you 'why are you still drinking?' and you can't think of damn good answer because you just don't know. And you just want to stop and just be like everyone else and just lead a relatively normal existence but you can't. And you can't just sip, or have a few beers like other people can. You have to swig, chug, and guzzle the stuff down as fast as you can. And the more you put in the more you want, but it never seems to fill the vast chasm you have inside you. Something missing. Something askew, but what is hard to say.

I'm a liar, i'm a thief, i'm a cheat.

Brooklyn 1927

Vito walked out of the dark alley unto the street feeling the cold breeze against his skin. It was early December and he wasn't really dressed for the cold but that didn't matter. His father was a stonemason who worked hard but he had six other mouths to feed so Vito didn't really blame him. Still he felt an exhilaration as only a 13 year old could feel. He had made it out, played hookie, gotten out of that damn place that he hated more then anything in the world. He had told the teacher he was going to the bathroom and had slipped past the janitor and the teachers. He was a big kid but he could by stealthy if he needed to. He had done it before with his friends from the neighborhood, broken into rich peoples houses and taking food and sometimes they had taken a few swigs off the bottle in the liquor cabinets. Vito had never much taken to the taste of the booze but after a few swigs it warmed him up nice and they all felt good. Vito reached into his coat and pulled out the folded piece of paper he had obtained at school. He pulled it out slowly and at first he wondered if it was real. He had stolen from Jimmy William's backpack after recess, five dollars. Five fucking dollars Vito thought as he unfolded the crumpled note. It was more money then he had ever held in his hands. He had seen his father with wads of the bills at payday but they were always gone almost as soon as they came in. But now he had one, to spend in any which manner he pleased. He felt powerful like the gangsters he saw who ran the speakeasy on the corner in the neighborhood. They always had plenty of the green bills and they never seemed to run out. 'Crime doesn't pay son.' His father had told him. 'Those are very bad men.' he had said. Still the words went in one ear and out the other. He thought of all the candy he would buy, the soda, maybe even a sirloin steak, he felt like the luckiest kid on earth. Vito had wanted to be like the men on the corner, the ones who never seemed to have a work but always had money, who life seemed to come easy to. He had seen his father bust his ass every day working on projects with little to show for it and he had always vowed that that wouldn't be him. That he would never have to want for anything like that. Vito turned the corner as he noticed the policemen coming down the street. Fuck, he thought avoiding the mans gaze. If they caught him on the street like this he would likely give him a good beating and then send him back to school. The beating he could handle, going back to that damn school he could not. Vito quickly crossed the street narrowly avoiding the model A tearing down the street. Vito was still somewhat unnerved by the massive metal bohemoth's coming down the street. The policemen hadn't noticed him distracted by something else. Vito pondered the rest of his day. Most of the beat cops in the neighborhood knew him so there was only one thing to do, take a trolley downtown.

Now witness, now witness love

I was thinking recently why I would never like to serve in the military. Not the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines or the National guard. Beyond the aspect of getting blown away and showering with other men I can't help but think what a horrible past our nation has. About the trail of tears where thousands of Cherokee and Seminole and creek Indians where forcibly removed from their homelands in the American Southeast and marched to Oklahoma. Of the use of slave labor to build our nation up from the start. And to think that I would be representing a nation capable of such acts, an instrument of its foreign policy is terrifying.

Yup

The story of America is the story of conquest. Of new lands and peoples. Sometimes when reading about this discovery and subsequent conquest of the New World the Native people that lived there are often overlooked. Not ignored entirely but brushed aside. As obstacles to progress. They're fate is acknowledged haphazardly but rarely told for what it was, a genocide. Granted using a modern term for something that happened in the past to sometimes frowned upon anyone who examined the practices and policies the Spanish, the British, and later the Americans would certainly come to the same conclusion. Right now I am reading about the end of the era of resistance among the Indians tribes with the massacre at Wounded knee. The years of the late 1880s had brought despair among the Sioux at Pine ridge agency. A drought had wiped out they're crops and the government had cut they're beef rations. They had once been a self-sufficient people now forced to live on government handouts. The feeling of despair spread across all of the Western Indians on the reservation and a prophet started to emerge. A Paiute Wavoka, had told his followers that if they would dance a dance he had shown them called the 'ghost dance,' that the great spirit would wipe out all the whites and the plains would once again be abundant with buffalo. That family and friends who had died would come back. A compelling message, especially in light of the dire circumstances they faced. But from what I have read about it I think the Indian agents and government officials wanted to provoke an incident. It was Custer's old 7th cavalry that participated in the massacre, and it does not seem to be a stretch to think they wanted revenge for the loss at Little bighorn.

This is real.

Fuck this. Fuck everyone. I really don't know what to do anymore. I want to scream to cry out. But I do not know what to say. To articulate what exactly is the problem with me. What is my major malfunction. Why do the pieces not fit? Exactly what is going on? And I don't know and I damn sure do not want to tell anyone.

The Jedi are extinct their fire has gone out of the universe.

People sometimes do not understand context. Take laws for example. A certain set of law determines weather a minor under 18 can work certain times. For example a 14 year old can't work past ten on a school night. But this law has a context because a little more then a century ago children that age were working fourteen hour shifts. Or things like affirmative action,or equal housing. Not too long ago things like getting a job or a house in a good neighborhood were not always an option for black people. So people who lament 'political correctness' in some ways do not understand the context. How not to long ago it was commonplace for white people to refer to blacks as 'niggers.' How history and events of the past have shaped peoples prospectives.

Slow ride

John O'neil awoke on the floor of his living room the rays of the late afternoon sun rousting him from his sleep. If the state he was in could be called sleep. He got up slowly noticing that he couch was right in front of him and he was somewhere near the coffee-table. It took him a minute for him to get his bearing. The last thing he could consciously remember was entering an establishment with his lawyer Herb. He had already imbibed almost a bottle of scotch before that so the memory was already hazy at best. Something had happened in that establishment that much he was sure as he felt a cup over his right eye. He got up to examine it in the mirror, his clothes were still intact which was good, and his suit was only slightly disheveled. What the fuck happened last night? John thought to himself as he walked over to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a tumbler. It was the only thing that seemed to ever make the headache go away for him anymore. He opened the liquor cabinet and opened the mirror, something he instantly regretted. His personal appearance had gone rapidly downhill in the past month and now he could see it in entirety. In addition to the gash over his eye, which was not as bad as it felt, he had a week old stubble and large dark circles under his eyes. Not to mention his stomach which seemed to get bigger every day. He extracted the bottle of scotch from the cabinet and pour himself a generous shot. What the fuck have I become? He thought as he downed the glass. When he had been a marine in the pacific what felt like ages ago he had trekked miles and miles in the jungle with pounds of equipment on his pack. These days he sometimes had trouble making it from his house to his car. There was trouble looming ahead he knew as he poured another shot. He had been narrowly granted bail after being arrested and charged with labor racketeering and extortion but he knew it wasn't over. The Italians would suspect him and suspicion was all the pretense they needed to make a move. Also John knew his arrest was only the tip of the iceberg, that the hammer was more then likely about to come down on the union and the whole family. They wouldn't get the mob and corruption out of the union entirely but it was likely they would try. Vito had wanted to meet with him today and it was getting late. Fuck John thought. It was an impossible situation. If he met with him it might lead to him getting clipped, if he avoided him it would most certainly result in it.