I don’t write essays. Maybe it’s because I can’t take criticism. Strike that maybe that is a solid yes. I am making an exception because I am exploding and at an uncomfortable simultaneous moment I am also as still as a giant vacuum in space (did that sound appropriately science-y?). I live my life like much of us, and while I feel and think so often that I am apart and that I have discovered the very molecule behind my individuality, it is important to note that I am of course not the first, the 42nd, nor the last to think such thoughts or even the naturally opposing thoughts occurring in many readers and myself as I write this right now thinking “get to the damn point, I hate overwrought introductions!”.

      So what am I getting at? How fundamentally exhausted are we all, at jobs, at never ending school, as the ‘ands’ go on. All of which accounts for untold hours spent while our financial and personal accounts themselves don’t add up to many fulfilling ‘ands’ at all. But while we work for less each year adjusted for inflation and many more of us are in a sour cream dollop of ever oozing debt somehow the nation and I do mean us as a country including the lowest approval rated Senate of all time, a country whose military spending is unfathomable, and whose education, health, and prison systems are deleterious we all simultaneously manage to smell manure and call it majestic.
Sure, you might be thinking as do I, we are a nation of righteous complainers how is it we maintain such a vast complex structure of denial.

    Truth is most dangerous, when it is your hands that must be stained by her darkness. The whistleblower is controversial, not just because of those in favor of bureaucracy or conspiracy but because by touching honesty, by devoting ourselves to it, even if we are not the cause of untold evil, we are now a source of fear for those who do not want to face uncomfortable truths. Indeed, there is a reason ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘truth’ are so commonly paired, and what a tart pairing they make.

       And while my very first blog post was about awareness, it is ironic now I should be talking here, after so long of looking and writing and creating and feeling still that umber that hums along, that tells me, that sings when I speak in hues that are difficult, and I worry people do not want to see, and I ache. Still in the muck and furious in defense I move along unable to stop observing as much as it would be an easier life, but all along the steps I walk there are roses, I cannot help but notice. Beautiful, yes among the scorn. And all my friends have cut themselves because they cannot bare to see their thorns.