Milestones across Western society are belongings drug out from the upper closet shelf to mark the past, used once in a while to share with others and dusted off to parade around in celebration. On the fourth Thursday of November this man, this father, this son, this brother, this friend has shuffled brain leafs to jot down a few words to celebrate. The soup bowl in the head needs a brief public tasting to ensure things don’t go mild. In the eyes of my eternal love I am her companion that rambles and raves about life’s oddly sorted connective tissue, to those below the Mason Dixon Line my voice is normal, and for the past decade these brief lines have constituted The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.
As my efforts to reach back through time in hopes that those before accept the plan agreed up in the original rank I long to know the third stanza of eternity. The work house of the holiest has never been about bearing a weight because I’d be a fool to deny renting a post office box in this Disneyland of creature comforts. So when the circus of speaker boxes push medication for first-world problems I do struggle not to explode in out loud laughter. A mere flash in the everlasting.
Gratitude is overdue to my parents this season of thanks, they were immigrants to the middle class buoyed by a lineage of Cherokee, Scotch mountain folk and Irish common farmers living life with a long view. And as I navigate through the photo montage of my full length motion picture their teachings stay relevant – avoid being a great argument if it sacrifices being a better man, and make every effort to limit the number of good intention bricks used for paving the road to the palace of waste.
As the cool winter breeze ushers in the season of spending I’m reminded that getting older does not worry me; it’s not having the stomach to handle 32 flavors of modern crazy. Color it as I may, frame it as I might, hypocrisy is still a minority partner in my life when it comes to mocking or pointing out fault in said crazy. That is why I am captivated by vain pursuits to complete the incomplete person – that temptation has always been a false god which manuscripts like a miraculous cure-all, yet when in practice actually it’s a diseased demeaning people and weakening all. There is nothing on this Earth or in the universe offering proof people are created equal, but all is lost if we as humans do not defend equality under the eternal laws. As arrogant or as righteous the practitioner we should never get those truths confused. So I’m not volunteering for the endless war over who will save the domesticated animals from themselves… it’s a graveyard of paternalism.
So until the next time the conveyor belt brings us around to this great American institution of celebration, I wish you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving.
Jarvis
