The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

With the muscle memory of an elderly man recalling his childhood class locker combinations, there is a familiar feel to this aging moment. That which is typically hidden is occasionally revealed, yet facts be damned! The reserved seats were bought on consignment and the crowds were in a pleasant mood, game for anything to follow. Twenty years of performance script, rendering verse and coming forth only when our water-logged starship has reached the designated coordinates around the space heater in the sky. Navigation has confirmed, a cheap dime-store calendar provided a second opinion. Trust but verify. We have arrived at the fourth Thursday in November. Hopefully, you caught the name of the orderly who assisted our escape from the self-help retreat, and if so, send him a thank you note because this is The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.

 The pimp game is easier these days as Caesars has been playing with house money. Every ballet box dictator turning up the flames, gotta collect on their piece of the insurance claim. The policy is written in paranoia ink and funded by loose cowboy finances. Them there vain and vile pumping unleaded cash into the pit that smells worse than July white trash, while the neon cathedrals mine for the fool’s gold fever. Just enough human to keep the animal side from being marked as fair game. Boy, your credit ain’t no good round these parts, better retreat with haste, good fortune is no longer mandatory.

The cell’s walls are coated in misty tide foam padding, put in place to protect brains voided out by endless amounts of liquid luck and ambient crazy. The new conformity is anti-conformity. Strolling paths littered with sticks and stones that break bones, more concerned are thee that a person might step on words that hurt. Statues removed. How will they ever find hate without landmarks? Yesteryear victors long laid to rest, peacefully and praised, become the ghosts wrestled by change artists, whose restoration brushes touched up the past to meet the present’s excellence. Those who avoid history are the ones sitting in the living room asking the pets and plants why there are so many reruns on repeat.

Prosperados evangelize the grifter’s creed in cold calculation. Dead air in their voices. The sort of conman who would rent out their mother’s soul for better margins. Reminding all that it’s a pleasure doing business with us and not forgetting our parting gift; a commemorative flashlight to search for our self-worth in the echo’s reflection. All the while war saints high on their lies stand strong and confident, assuring the masses that we’ll be safe if the superhero is untethered to do what is right. Flags and suspicion. If they die young the devil never has a chance to get ’em. So, get yours while the getting is generous. And in the end, when your stone is thrown into eternity’s pond, may the ripples dance on and on and on, long after you’re gone.     

Jarvis

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

The season is upon us, low cold winter sun taking up its position in the southern sky and stretchy pants pulled from the closet for grazing. Sharing time with those still on this side of the veil to make new memories while remembering our dearly departed. Memory is just a fresh coat of paint on the long-gone reality of actual events – creative license granted leeway for telling taller and taller tails to entertain. Better buy a larger boat that fish is getting bigger with every recollection. On this day of the fowl feast, my ballad of nonsense celebrates another year of manifested life and the spoils of war within my head are shiny rich. The digs speak to the contrary but I was once edgy before going straight and this is The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.

Occasionally we gotta be reminded that the devil rents space in our heads, cuz if these rouge thoughts were ever discovered indigenous the prescription dosage needed to adequately suppress would terrify the most hardened street junky. Long gone are the days when trusting myself was a sure bet. Randomness is on the loose, fate a gamble, and life’s roulette wheel just got flooded with extra balls bouncing toward my number. Thankfully I’m only 10mg nuts today. The curated world is fueled by artificially inseminated anxiety that the carnival barkers and Dooms Day weathermen postulate. Crafty sons of virtue! They gonna highjack your freedoms, enslave life’s font, use a wire to solve mistakes, scrap the boom sticks, punish the punctual, bring their own diarrhea monkeys to a crap show, verified, two teams on the same team, the hat the rabbit the magician the audience all in on the con, fire thru rain, free to do but not free from, water will be the new land, freedumbs, lawless, optical illusions, leisure violence, walking with the king, a new leader is born. Lead us! Oh, ye great pied piper play the cult anthem. Lucky dogs we be to be in the know – hear the truth and good fortune for our side is the right side.

Sharpening the teeth of soup eaters, they are hypnotically castrated from responsibility while walking in the direction they are told.  The sons of feral thinkers outsourced character flaws for a new religion of science friction, then lit the fox’s tail on fire and set it loose through city hall as bloodthirsty hounds rachet up the excitement level. Weaving around nuance to broad brush the actual shading of life, offering no chaser for the elixir substituted as a sacrament in a church service that is more complex than calculus taught by a pissed-off chihuahua. Nostrils flared out and looking to whoop ass. Someone better call the fire marshal because there are too many angry sheep up in here. The instinct of a mob is to march for change on the road to extinction. WAIT! What? Hold the apocalypse! On second thought, the concert of collusion is about the begin - innuendo, hearsay, and fertile grounds starved for the performance. Ahhhh lawsy day, the maestro wearing his American Flag bowtie for this occasion and testing out new lies. It ain’t wrong folks when set to the right music. We just good ole folk using bad people to further good causes. They got the cash and power, so changing the rules is superficial while serving humanity’s wants. Then we foolish dreamers walked out on the check and stole the tip jar. Payback is gonna be a beast.

Until the next time,

Jarvis

 

 

 

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

You can skip to video in 5. "Like misplacing your left hand, 4, you’ll get through, 3, the day, 2, but it will be, 1, an—"  Hey there audience! Welcome to the 400^th anniversary of the three-day New World feasts with the Indians. Feathered kind, not the dot kind. Hospitality was good, food had the right touch of soul and compassion, and then destiny manifested itself. Enjoy your reservations and casino revenues, cuz we are done unhinged the nation’s trunk lid and the baggage is skidding down the interstate. The gas-guzzling beast drifts around the corner to the fourth Thursday in November – the day dedicated to sacrificing flightless fowl to the gods of gratitude. Pass the bowl of outlaw logic, the one whipped up by the words dedicated to The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.

Thankfully the devil wears scales, cuz these manicured demons are difficult to mark. The forked-tongue peddlers make a cash offer for our souls, knowing they'll rent it back to us if our credit is clean and the deposit check clears. An overpopulated inbred hellscape of tribal cattle, long stripped of agent thought. Few return sane from this mental poverty. Children raised with bleak posterity dream of being bad... at least the bad kids get lumps of coal at Christmas to stay warm. WE MUST SAVE THE CHILDREN!

Church saves lives, and the state makes lives safe.

Elected pimps nurturing common dominators. Whoring out synthesized mayhem and unity to folks with the mental fortitude of warm Play-Doh. Conning them with circus trinkets and carnival funhouse mirrors. All the while the grandstands savagely resemble a hate orgy fueled by rising ticket prices. Cult fidelity keeps them energized. The whole lot reeks of decaying aspirations. A dream that committed suicide with a rotten dog bone. Even maggots flee in disgust. A place where nightmares go for additional content.

“Sorry, I did not see you there. No, you’re refined. Go ahead. Yes, I do agree a touch of artificial color in my life is required.”

Passing the days in a memory lane of well-polished treasures. Ingots from better days long passed. Those were decent days. Yet less charming than things so currently. Real or imagined moments of the now are the wagon to hitch the dog. The now comes with options. Where life is either drained of color or deception is chased away by borrowed thoughts. Left unattended the borrowed may become ours. Nothing original said the liberated, just new.   

Seek out the liberated, for they possess a belief in happiness. In the company of the divine the liberated squeeze souring minds until clarity arrives, or he passes out, or the nerves short circuit. All possible outcomes force the liberated to hold tight. Quitters are left out of all history books written for winners. 

May we all be memorialized in word and phrase someday. The illiterate will surely enjoy the pictures. Words that will remind those who follow us, that life is only worth living when the value of every life is valued. May you have a free life. A life free to choose. A life held responsible for choices. When you have choices, choose life.

Until next year.

Jarvis

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

The day has come again, when families and friends join together in thank-filled traditions to celebrate bounties harvest, football, and unavoidable food comas. In an age when facts are fluid, honoring artistically licensed stories that speak of religious fugitives who wined and dined a few locals is a welcome rest from actual events long manipulated beyond recognition. For nearly two decades the day dedicated to flightless fowl has shared a space with the figments of my reality. Cunningly devised smoke signals sent up on in a wind storm spells out, The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.  

Days are long, years are short.

The fourth Thursday in November ritual is a discourse through an odd assortment of thought snippets from my annual journey around our neighborhood star. If the notes and quotes are taken one at a time, they are merely dough faced affirmations of a word jockey, but if read with the speed of a flipbook, one can actually track the heat signature of acquired knowledge.

I wake each morning a realistic optimist, taking every precaution to dodge zealots who run toward compunction with vendetta speed. Their reckless pursuits to shore up tribal ethos have degraded into truth overriding truth. We will all be damned if the light-seekers allow nuance to die by the mouth of ultimate-truth despots. Our existence is a multifaceted diamond, not a two-side coin. When life’s subtle variants are viewed as an "either or" option that is when black and white perspective takes root. 

The outrage over newsmongers misinforming and spiraling society toward a doomed future can be heard at every dinner table and read in millions daily of posts. Yet, there ain’t a person out there asking for a tissue to cover their mouth from spewing simple-minded contagions. 

Modern virtue makes extension look wholesome.

The doctrine guiding this great land only survives with a moral people living genuinely by the words written in the script of flawed men. Reshaping founders as devils to settle overdue scores will expose great deeds to the scorn of contemporary grievances. Nothing new there. A great man once told me, “Nothing is original, just new.” I am reassured that history only repeats in the movies. 

Amazing to think that the clouds float overhead in white wonder, parading along, completely oblivious to the hairless apes playing out one long soap opera below. Fascinating to consider that the Universe can focus on expansion efforts while humans are such a time suck. Hard to imagine the Creator has any energy left to grind his teeth watching destiny attempt to wrangle feral barn cats who are chasing shiny objects while captivated by nickel-plated hyenas posing as starship captains. We need a renaissance.

May your loved ones be safe and happy. To those we have lost, your spirit lives in the influences on our lives. Peace and happiness are mindsets that so many possess, which is infectious when shared with those near. I am truly grateful for those people who share their peace and happiness with me. Until next time.

If the choice is yours, always choose life.

Jarvis

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

The calm winds for sailing life’s seasons are to my back. Making durable progress in a familiar direction amongst all the chaos littering the shore brings comfort. A journey of this sort collects many thoughts, and for nearly two decades my mental cargo has been offloaded during November’s last Thursday. The day of thanks and giving ain’t no ticker tape parade for a clouded traveler exhaling his own worth -- just a few ideas hearkening back to times when people were driven away by cars, not by opinions. Today I believe that writing as if, and speaking as if, and being as if I am the only person in the audience ensures one thing… another installment of The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.  

Not sure if this whole thing is real, but I am convinced to imagine it is. The wisdom jar contains more and more unknowns as humanity’s training camp administers to more and more malignant souls. I am most grateful at this moment that there are a lot of great things still remaining. For good or ill I lean further away from trash fires wafting toxins through digital infinity. One man’s dread is another man’s comfort of catching his reflection in the mob. Notwithstanding the mean and worthless social soap box, I have no desire of joining a pep rally in the throes self-help hangers. This year is about a lovestruck me.

When the dirt calls. Wake free of flesh’s prison. Next, eternity. Love shall remain. Eternally.

On this day, in the distant past, a young newlywed woke to thoughts of gratitude for an uncharted voyage ahead of him and his forever bride. While she slept, he penned an open letter of thanks for her. She had unlocked an understanding stored down in an ancient system -- an understanding that once true love has you you are never returning the same person. Before her heart became his, the nights were full of errors. Such power in letting go of foolish pursuits to find questions to answers. Tall and lost -- not yet bolted together tight -- he came to a realization purpose is not defined by what is done, rather who it is done with.  

Doing their best to work through flawed beauty held in coming together as one, they had to shed “me and you.” Fumbling towards a space where fading vertical pronouns no longer come to mind -- abandoning I and me for we and us as the breath of posterity entered their home. The patter of baby steps cured all aches. First words never forgotten. Hugs rung out his beast with the ease of a rag. Yet, a father is velvet and steel. Guilty of caring for each precious gift as if a breeze could crumble them -- while fully conscious of his capacity and willingness to unleash unspeakable hell if harm takes notice of his children. A mere fraction compared to their mother’s readiness. Easy and simple.

Until next year, may your love still give you chills like a good song.

Jarvis  

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

If my nose still works and the calendar is correct, then it’s that time again. People communally expressing thanks for a band of 17th century refugees breaking bread with a band of ancient wanderers. Celebrating the fusing of Puritan tradition with nomadic first nation convention is best memorialized by consuming copious amounts of flightless fowl, enjoying American style football, and soaking up family. For the past decade and a half this day of plenty has been home to a personal rush of light-seeking. When thinken goes to written, then I’ve gotten to The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.    

Greetings from the space orb’s lido deck. Best wishes and good fortune upon this race of galactic nomads as we tumble through the universe on a water covered interstellar lava ball. To be honest, a lifetime spent pacing around a big atomic fireball in the sky can be maddening when the journey is ill-defined and no destination in sight. The alternative is nigh, so I am grateful my flesh suit rental was not due back to the soil.  

Calling out to fellow tenant astronauts who seek truth as their star chart to navigate our place. Without a guide, the fool is surely doomed to chasing the self down a foggy ambush trail -- inevitably toward chaos. Truth is the religion to save us from chaos. Because it is the god of the damned siccing dragons of chaos upon us when truth is abandoned. Chaos is not followed, worshiped, or praised. Yet, in thought or in action many kneel at it’s altar of waste. Waste… the greatest of sins. Wasting life, love, relationships, thought, or time. Time is only unique to this reality, and the truest of test for all. Blessed be the ones who do not feel it’s influence. For those haunted by the unstoppable fleeting, may the weight of life distract you and me.

We are pack animals that need weight on the back to progress. We are human, not beast of burden. But even the highest form of life, with the freedom to choose, can become bogged down at the crossroads of personal motivation and social constructs. Unbalanced toward the latter leads to herding and echo chambers of thought. Best of intentions filtered through groupthink are a collective dictator of any utopia. We mustn’t wallow with the swine or throw pearls before them. Endearment to the greater human race means striving for further light and knowledge at the peril of turning some pigs toward the sea.

Until this time next year, be well and continually in good spirits. May your days be filled with joy and surrounded by those you love.

Be pro-choice, always choose life.

Jarvis

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

This is not where it began, and I sure don’t know how the story ends, so thanks be due as we wake to another dawn. The orbit is the same, the path unchanged, but this day of thanksgiving comes around faster and faster each year. Where I am sitting on Spaceship Earth the speed of repeat is blazing by the further I get from my birth. Another year older, another year thankful to have my eternal self still cloaked in dirt on this side of eternity. How thankful I am each year to put ink to the blank page -- for good or ugly -- this pilgrimage seeks truth in an age of fairy tales. I hold a pen in my hand like a flashlight illuminating another journey through The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.

Living in the now is living in a space between creative licensing and sober hallucinations, where history is modeling clay and future is at best a maybe. The once calming musician’s verse playing the songs of progress across this land can barely be heard over the maddening shrieks of the herd. A herd of two legged swine wallowing in the pasture of weak mindedness, surrounded by well fertilized crops growing in only the best guano. The harvests are plentiful year round. Sooooey! Eat up little piggy. Never satisfied, the handheld feed-trough of digital consumption has an endless supply for the herd. Hell, the wild beast has more humanity… ceasing once full to preserve for tomorrow. A crazy time for a crazy land.

If crazy were whiskey, then the drinks would be cheap. I can handle crazy out in the streets, clothed in tattered rags arguing with the unseen. But I won’t chance the well-dressed crazy with an appetite for military grade pharmaceuticals and a high tolerance to public ridicule. The type of crazy holding office -- hands over their heart, in three piece suits, and adorned with legitimizing American flag lapel pins. We are raising our leaders in the image of ourselves. Monocessationism and lacking depth perception. In the abundance of proof, the fool is eyes wide blind in all efforts to celebrate a triumph of conviction over experience. The sane gotta stick together, because we only have each other to thrive in the belly of the beast.

May we hold tight the love ones in our lives, may we constantly recall the ones who have left us, and may we celebrate giving darkness the slip one more day. Yesterday is truly gone, we are face to face with today, and staring down tomorrow’s grey leap. Only take serious things serious to avoid the hangman’s noose of self-righteousness. The sweet fruit’s taste of human kinship turns to sour aftertaste when we inhale the fragrances of self. If not careful, the creature will control the creator. Fight the behaviors, mindsets, attitudes, and thoughts that may vandalize our race. The only race that ever mattered… The human race.

Jarvis

Be Pro-Choice… Always choose life. Let’s end wholesale genocide of the unborn.