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.

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

Time flies by at the speed of light and we are here again -- the fourth Thursday of November. Pageantry is the table spread, communion of family and friend the circumstance. We are bound by lineage or by common tongue around the table to celebrate a tradition of giving gratitude. Pooling of mutual admiration on the day we can eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow we shop! This year’s spectacle is brought to you by The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.  

This land is a room full of winners. On stage the American Dream unfolding before us. This year’s dreams were produced by indigestion from months, and months, and months of monkey turd tacos served up by the prospective ruling class. Looking around as the hangover sets in for a season I can no longer discern between natives and exiles in Eden. Hopefully we are waking from the fog of verbal war. The crowds have dispersed. Some in relief, some in curse. The reds shout, “Hallelujah!” The blues cry, “How the hell ya let this happen?” 

Discourse be damned when people are charged. Experience has shown gasoline don’t burn as fast as emotions. Once a grand plan has burnt to the land. Only a circus still stands. In the end we sat through a fairytale with an ice queen, a taker, a magician, and sixteen slaughtered dwarfs. They broke all the commandments consistently, and with enthusiastic vigor. Damn robbers! The only weapon of force needed was our belief in free-dumb. The greatest of noble hustles is when the conman and the mark know the rules. What an ant kingdom this land has become. America is so loaded with internal evidence of fragility that pretty soon we won’t get credit for accepting it on confidence alone. How much longer can the founder’s plan snatch the Republic from the mob’s jaws?    

Rational minds must stick together now that the fringe has gone professional. It won’t be easy to wash the taste of first class out of their mouths. These bastards have financing, false news, and lions. We’ll need to grit our teeth, cuz in the lion’s den the bite is coming and the concert of pain is nigh.  

There will be days when shooting for “almost fine” is a day to be proud of. It’s great to have goals! More than ever I am rooting for the canary in the coal mine. Her family must be so proud of her station – signaling the world’s pending doom by her lifeless corps. Keep chirping little bird, we still have a great deal of fight in our belly. I love this land, and I love this starship! It’s the only one accepting my race: the human race.  

Until next year. Live life, don’t merely exist, and be your own normal. If you do it your own way for your own reasons, then live with the consequences. For good or for ill. Stay strong my friends. Dig in, check in and let history mop up the details.  

Pro-life for life! Let’s end recreational abortions.

Jarvis

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

Word is in from the heavens; “Mankind’s star charts are still accurate.” The universe is still out there. And the birds are still flying south this year. As the sane strive to avoid the brink, there are those clothed in warrior wardrobes shrouding all but the windows to their souls, polluting the www dot with their hornet’s blood. Murdering a plenty in the name of whatever. But it’s my hope on this day that the darkness some export from the abyss will become near past soon. Let us enjoy our own nostalgia by fostering the healing power of reminiscing past blessings. And what better day to do this than the fourth Thursday in November. The almanac of time traces this day back to 53 proud refugees celebrating their gardening skills with a few locals. They found no need to discuss future land development plans. No parades of lies. No disclosing of future floods of casino retributions. Not even a historical footnote mentioning it is time for another installment of The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.

These words incubate in my fingers all year, now I just need to shake them out. No longer a concept of packaged thought inspired by understanding’s torchbearers – this year’s annual rag of prose is a declaration of war on America’s knowledge famine. Uniformed opinion loosely based on maneuvered facts thickens the devil’s fog of idiot. He marinates in the sludge of mental waste. A space ever expanding with conspiracy theorist; they seek to save the lazy mind from revealed truth one keystroke at a time. I would never claim martyrdom to secure The Bill of Rights, but I am well pleased that the “X” button in the upper right corner is protected under it’s ratification. However, as long as others are safe from smite I sustain those who chose to advocate for their ideal society. We all should work to keep them alive and free to speak. Ensure they survive, just not thrive.   

 

The reshaping of America by the will of many is the greatest gamble the Founding Fathers set in motion with their aggregated system. Today some, if not many, believe the country they were born into will not be the same country they belong to at their end. America in name only. An America consistently numb with well-maintained momentum financing surface level happiness for the purpose of keeping the rabble from scorching our shared paradise. We will be damned by the humanistic perspective. Supplying the brush strokes to the son of the dawn’s Gravity Hill painting… a portrait of an illusion. The illusion of an upward journey toward equality. One day the gravity of subjugation by those in the perceived know will bind foolish worshipers of mind. Fend off the madman’s bullets, rage against intellectual paternalism.

Even though I rue the day a generation lives out the words of the ancients, the DNA of the plan comforts. God is an astronaut with a great eye for organic architecture. Evolution is a wonderful tool. When looked through the lens of the eternities both science and faith are estranged siblings orphaned by the steward race. May we all remember reality is individualistic, and this space ship is all we have for the moment.

 

Be pro-choice. Always chose life.

Jarvis

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

The sun is sailing across the sky at that familiar angle. The smells of giving thanks have returned to our homes. Gold and silver are briefly turned away to enjoy others. Some may be excited; some may dread the crisp air outside announcing old man winter’s reminder that our top half of this great spaceship needs a rest. And if my calendar reads correct it’s nearing the eleventh month’s end. Her Latin mother named her “Novem,” the Romans selected the ninth spot in their day planner, but then the Catholics felt she needed to book end autumn on the eleventh page. Even though the marketing executives have hijacked the spotlight for their pilgrimage of consumer, the fourth Thursday in November will always be Thanksgiving Day. And less important to humanity, this day ushers in another installment of The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.

As good news ceases to be salient in our multi-layered anxiety cake, there is comfort in knowledge that life is relatively long and things change. However, stretch out eternity’s ribbon in both directions and view existence without an alpha or omega, our little patch of probation is a few stitches of the master’s loom. I’m grateful for the patterns on the fabric of man’s recent past revealing how the pursuit of calm trumps chaos. Some people attempt to tattoo bygone mistakes on those in the now. Nothing good comes by staining our walls with those past flaws. What happened to context? Even though context is amoral, it is malleable. And if left in the wrong hands in this age of fire and ice it can become deadly daggers or folly’s pillow. I can never guarantee my words will play well together, but I know with surety light always defeats darkness. One can only exist in the absence of the other. Never reciprocal.       

In this season of life I fully accept my actions to be the ghost of my children’s future. Because life is terminal, and no one gets out alive, these lines are ultimately for my linage just over the distant future’s horizon. Hopefully these words will ensure that I exist in the written form beyond a brief mortal sojourn. May my posterity find understanding in what I believed and can gain insight to help them stand on their choices. Pause! Choices have escape routes; consequences do not. I have anchored my life to that statement. May you gain strength from seeking out knowledge that choice; and more importantly agency, did not begin at the cutting of the umbilical cord. Disputation on the road to personal enlightenment is healthy. Strive for cultivating assurance by listening to counter points. Yet, skill in one school does not translate as a lock stock and barrel orator on the substance of things hoped for, while denouncing the evidence of things not proven. Be mindful of rhetoric as it is the fool’s white stone propagating the appearance of knowledge. It will condemn those who self-inflect ignorance. There is no valiance in thoughtless stupor or just marking time before the end. That is waste. And waste is simply sin.

To all my friends and family, have a safe and happy Thanksgiving. And until the next revolution around our neighborhood star.

Color is perception. Behavior is perspective.

Jarvis

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

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

The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner

As the merry-go-round makes another lap in perfect order, giving heed to the big nuclear fireball in the center of it all, we are less than a power bill cycle away from the end of the Mayan calendar. King K'inich Janaab' Pakal, we should've gotten a bigger stone. This might freak somebody out someday. If this is the end, rock it until the break of day, cuz I'm going to take a backseat nap before it all goes down. Nevertheless, today is today. The day with ground fowl in the oven and the diet A&W root beer chilling to celebrate the successful journey of a few hundred 17th century boat people to the promise land. And for nearly a decade now Bob Ross's happy little mountains love where they live a little more as the raccoons and old possums translate another installment of The Chronicles of a Lost Southerner.

The climate control kids race in the car pool lane with their hazards a blaze; rushing to sell carbon for credits in horror of the ghost of progress past. In the words of a master of words smithing; human nature is but a frail filament of incipient folly, especially fickle in the presence of prosperity. And I say this species is not of the order of physical progress of evolution. Darwin was still correct! Those pretty little island finches surely were distant cousins of just one. Natural selection minds me none. Let evolution continue to change the native terrestrial because we are of the foreigner's race; the race of Adam... Apes are friends, not ancestors!

Humans are giddy beings caught up in just being. Some spend all their life looking into sky for a speck of life on a space rock, while arguing life on this earth is a choice. Stop chasing the space yeti, the great planner designed this brief history of time to never let us see those who inhabit the rest of the celestial real estate. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of planets inhabited by the human equivalent of Darwin's finches; all endowed with the gifts of music, art, written word, belief, creativity, death, destruction, faith, and the choice to endure and gain, or to bark at the stars. No matter the size of the rocket ship or the power of the satellite beams, we will never bridge the universe’s Galápagos Islands. That will only occur once the envelopes of time closes for good. There are no space saucers. No little green men. No alien visitors waiting for us to evolve. Just those there and us here -- all working through a plan of being more than just a being. Working to finish what started on the dawn of the mortal parade. The road is not as unfamiliar as one may believe, nor lonely as some think. Just know that we’re not alone.  

Happy Thanksgiving,

Jarvis