i wrote this in june 2004. i don't know what the hell i was thinking when i wrote it, though. i had just finished reading saul williams' ,said the shotgun to the head, if that explains anything, which it probably doesn't, since you've probably not even heard of it, much less read it. you should actively pursue it though, because it is truly excellent.

there was a singer a decade ago who for one reason or another decided his life was not worth living, and so he ended it. no one really understood this - some to the point that they felt he was murdered - but whether it was suicide or homicide is incidental. the real word is regicide. rex dolori - the king of pain. all the children who found an outlet and an idol and a friend in this singer found the end of all their hopes and the beginning of the realization of all their fears, realizing that surely if this god with a guitar and a microphone was mortal, then they must be too. and they cried. and these children's parents saw, in this artist's death, the deaths of their own children, their children that they never understood. but understand this: the decision to live or die lives with the individual.

there was a poet who wrote about life-in-death, a beautiful yet grotesque woman who sailed on a ship with death himself. this poet never mentioned that corollary condition, just as fearsome, perhaps even more so - death-in-life, a condition whose symptoms are rarely noticed until it is too late. for death-in-life is a state of mere existence, a state which is often confused with living. do not be fooled. those who are so numbed by pain or loss or drugs (medicinal or otherwise) that they become little more than organic machines - they are the ones who simply exist. who, then, can be counted among the living? it is difficult to say, for there are no set criteria for life. perhaps it has to do with the subject's heart - his emotional spectrum. there are those of us who see our lives as one solid black. these people are blind, blinded by their own need to roll in the muck, raking the waste of their own lives. others can see only white for miles. they too are blind, blinded by the artificial brightness offered by civilization. leaping from cloud to cloud, they do not scrutinize. there is another group, who are the most comfortable with their outlook, the most convinced they see things as they are, and they are also the blindest of all. these people see only gray. they are blind - blinded by their own refusal to see anything through the fog they themselves created. but there is another group. these are the ones who can actually see what's really there. colors. they see the black and the white, but refuse to stay in the gray - they fall across the gap from white to black, but jump back up to white again, dancing across reds and purples and greens and blues. wandering at will across the entire spectrum. they see the black and the white, and realize that with every white comes a little black, but with every black a little white is present. there is a concept in eastern philosophy called yin and yang, representing the duality of nature - and therefore of life. yin cannot exist without yang; yang cannot exist without yin. darkness cannot exist without light, man cannot exist without woman, pleasure cannot exist without pain ... black cannot exist without white. but white also needs black. man needs woman - pleasure needs pain. those who see color are able to do so because they see the duality that life entails. they see that there is no way to live at the extremes or firmly in between - not at black or white or gray - we cannot be fixed in position indefinitely. we must shift, ebb and flow. be as water. those who become stagnant become doomed. those who plant themselves plant their destruction. they will simply fade away, whether at thirty years old or at ninety.

there is a poet who once wrote about the deities present in every person, that fight for a chance to see what their host sees. he said that, sometimes, they claw their way over to him, to see their host through his eyes. these deities are always watching. they, in their divinity, deserve to see color. and since they are you - you deserve to see color. you deserve it. of everything that could have happened to you, life is not the worst. circumstances are only that ... circumstances. they pass. whether you pull yourself out of the hole left by the boulder that landed on you is up to you. whether you can make a safe landing from the heights you climbed to is up to you. whether you can get up and walk on your own without fear, with your eyes darting all around, taking every single thing in (not with eyes planted on the ground, not with eyes up to the sky, not with eyes staring firmly at the boundary in between, but with eyes all over - above, below, in front, behind, left, right - in short, three dimensions) is up to you. whether you're willing to stand up and question, explore, or whether you can only lay down and accept what happens to you - it's up to you.

there is a singer who used to wish to be a black man, to be able to talk about freedom and justice as they did ... and to have a cause worth dying for. he used to wish to be a woman, to have a reason to live and die with dignity. perhaps this is what living is: to be able to live, to have a life that, when faced with the loss of color (of truth and freedom and justice) would be worth dying for. a monochrome life or a colored one - this is the decision we ultimately make. to exist and fade away ... or to rage on until we are extinguised or burn ourselves out? to gouge out our own eyes at the horror we see, or to revel in it ... or even learn from it? experience - both good and bad - is what makes us human, is possibly the least common denominator we all share. to deny ourselves the good, the bad, or both ... is to deny our humanity. our vitality. in short, our lives. the only thing left at that point is an empty shell of a human being, in need of being filled with a soul. the only thing left at that point is ... an organic machine. you're already dead. it's just a matter of letting your body catch up with you.

song: "ultrasonic sound" - hive