As a boy I often wondered exactly how dark the color black could get. I also wondered about the brightest white, just not as often. While being forced to sit on a metal chair at a cafeteria table in Catechism class, I made drawings of demons with a #2 pencil. Totally dissatisfied with the results of my creative efforts, I wondered where I could get the blackest pencil on earth. I imagined myself making a deal with the devil to get the blackest pencil, and once he had forked it over, I’d ask him to please sit still so I could capture his unholy likeness in my current cartoon style. I never did get the opportunity to cut a deal with the Master of Demons back then, and years later when I finally did, I’d already learned just how dark the blackest black was, so bargaining for a magic pencil no longer seemed relevant or appropriate. I’d come to know that the blackest black inhabits a place of no coming back, or if you do come back, you always bring some of the black back with you. Your shadow gets darker, your life-light gets dimmer and your chances of achieving sainthood grow slimmer. Absolute black is a living organism. It resides in the place where night terrors gnash their teeth and shriek their fury. It holds its rightful place within the infinite span of our cosmos at the gateway of every sucking black hole in the Universe. Now I’m left wondering whether every black hole in space might lead to the same Catholic Hell. Eternal damnation becomes a serious consideration when you’re raised to fear God, Satan, and fire. Isn’t it interesting though, that a fiery hell on earth seems more and more plausible when you factor in the onset of global climate change? I can’t quite remember – Is digression one of the seven deadly sins? If so, you can add it to my lifelong list of transgressions so I can atone for it later. Great balls of lightning, I must get back to the point! This narrative is not meant to be funny or fictitious, or even an attempt to entertain. It is a grave warning. It’s a metaphorical fable about what might happen to you, if you dare to go looking for the source of absolute black.
“Unwound”
I’m still sifting through the finer details (i.e., the charcoaled remains of my journey to hell’s gateway) in an attempt to find reason, or at least some semblance of rationale behind my decision to follow Darkness to its source. A central factor in my choice to set forth on a fool’s quest to find the origins of evil, was my premature introduction to the story of Jesus Christ. Like most of my childhood friends, I deeply appreciated my Catholic upbringing, on one day each year – December 25th. But when it came to Sunday morning masses and Catechism classes, I thought the toys and candies of Christmas fell short of sufficient payment, especially when I took into account the yearly quota of lost playtime hours invested. Halloween, on the other hand, asked for no penance or devotion, seeking only a one-night stand of some good old-fashioned gluttony and a propensity to play pranks on unwary adults. And at least the inventors of Halloween were forthright about its roots being firmly grounded in fear and morbidity. Halloween was, and is still, one of my favorite holidays. But the world doesn’t offer a religion based on Halloween’s moralistic principles, and even if it did, I’m sure my mother wouldn’t have approved. So, it’s back to Saints Peter and Paul church and my misguided interpretation of the story of Jesus Christ.
This is the first chapter in the first book of a trilogy I’ll be writing. The three books will be based on the true story of my lifetime (as yet unfolding…). Please feel free to criticize. But do be advised that I still have connections in the Kingdom of Absolute Black!
Jesus said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” Luke 23:34
And maybe the Almighty Father did forgive them, but I didn’t. Even as an eight-year-old boy, I was convinced that they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. The life story of Jesus Christ that I was taught during those many hours of indoctrination into the Catholic religion, stirred in me an enormous internal conflict. I’m sure the reaction I had to the story is fairly common among children when they learn how Jesus’ life ended. However, when I began to internalize the teachings, I am certain that I was too young to understand that the “they” in Luke’s passage did not equate to ‘we’ in my life story. In a single misstep – a naive misinterpretation – I accepted an overwhelming amount of guilt and a huge burden to make recompense for the unspeakable atrocity we committed in the crucifixion of Christ. I embraced the idea that, ‘We knew exactly what we were doing, and we did it anyway’. Here was this miraculous human being who taught love and forgiveness, healed his brothers and sisters, openly accepted sinners and saints alike, and we decided he should be tortured and killed for daring to be different from the rest of us. I became secretly enraged by all of this. I focused the magnitude of that rage inward. It’s so strange to think that I identified more with the teachings of Jesus than I did with the teachings of my grade-school teachers, and because of that, I nearly destroyed my capacity to identify with either school of thought. This is when I started to wonder about the blackest black.
The troublesome thing about childhood wonder – it can lead you a long way down a path in one direction or another, and due to inexperience, you might arrive at a place of new understanding, a place where you’re no longer wondering about that specific thing, but you find yourself hopelessly lost about every other thing. I’ve learned that the distance between absolute black and the brightest white is relative to the number of gradations on a gray scale your current senses are able to perceive. Everything comes down to life experience. When I first began wondering about the blackest black, and when I started making my plans to challenge the unholiest evil, I was grossly inexperienced. Could I have used the word innocent here, instead of inexperienced? Absolutely not. There exists a similar ‘gray scale’ between innocence and guilt that I’m not ready to explore at this point in the story, and besides, one of the very first lessons I learned in catechism was that we humans are all guilty at birth. Original sin exempts us from innocence. If there is a completely neutral gray, a tone that is precisely centered between the blackest black and the purest white, and we insert the equivalent of that gray on the scale between guilt and innocence, the church teaches that we are already closer to guilt than we are to innocence, even at the moment of birth. It’s a bit of dogma that I’ve never been able to come to terms with. It seems unfair that the human race will never be free from original sin – and furthermore, never be eligible for a complete collective redemption. But I guess that’s where the story of Jesus Christ intersects with the story that I’m telling you now.
Down the Tube
The story of Jesus sparked in me a black/white obsession, but there were many other stories that fueled it into an internal raging inferno. So many stories of heroic avengers doing the right things, following the right paths, and coming out clean and righteous on the other side of their trials and tribulations. From the Holy Bible there was the story of David and Goliath, from contemporary literature there was Frodo Baggins from the Shire, and from Hollywood there was Andy Dufresne from the Shawshank State Penitentiary. I was disappointed in God’s failure to intercede on our behalf and infuriated with the devil for leading us so far astray. I vowed to avenge Jesus of Nazareth and every other human being that had ever been bullied, tortured, maimed or destroyed at the behest of Satan and his horde of demons. I would willfully confront the Prince of Darkness and demand full accountability. A disobedient speck of stardust countering the darkest forces of the Universe.
We all have our stories to tell, and I’m committed to telling you this one. If you appreciate the entertainment, please consider leaving a tip in the jar on the Donate*Contact page. Every small donation will help towards getting me settled into Savannah and ready for classes starting on September 11th. Thank you for your consideration!
When the pendulum swings toward angst, I am in the pit. To ride the pendulum back out of the pit, I must summon forth and exercise heartfelt serenity. When I was a child, I found it almost effortless to initiate, fluctuate, and regulate my spiritual energies, largely because it seemed to occur naturally. I would be completely bummed out in one minute and then entirely elated in the next. I was thrilled when we kids found a long-forgotten railroad bridge in the woods across the street from my house. It had deteriorated to the point that its wooden cross beams were seemingly only held together by the corroded steel girders and rusty tracks the workers had so long ago spiked into them. The trestle over the river had a short span and an even shorter height – its rails were perhaps only twenty feet above the surface of the shallow flow. Although there were some jagged piles of dangerous looking debris down below the span, crossing it was probably not a matter of life and death. But death was certainly not out of the question either. At least that’s the argument my dad would have used to scare me straight if he found out I was crossing that rotted bridge. At the age of seven, with three of my best friends cheering me on, I tiptoed carefully, and deliberately, over the span from the near to the far shore. As I remember it, my friends all chickened out that first time, meaning I had to return to the near shore almost immediately so we could stay together and seek out other brave new worlds and daredevil challenges until darkness fell. While the fear was definitely real in the moments of crossing the bridge, it was the recurring nightmares I had as a result of the crossings that turned out to be the most terrifying part of the experience. As the term recurring suggests, the dream was always the same – a Tyrannosaurus Rex chases me to the rickety hulk of the train trestle – for reasons unclear, the beast’s shadow is always scarier than its blood slathered jowls – I cross the bridge as if in a dream (I was), leaping expertly from tie to tie and avoiding the gaping black holes in its steel-strapped wooden ribcage – when I stick a solid landing on the other side, I look down, and there on the burnt coal ground of the far shore I find a cherry flavored Pixie Stick, unopened – I pick it up and start to pour the sugary contents into my mouth with nary a care about, or memory of, the dinosaur’s monstrous shadow or the fact that I’d even been having a nightmare. I suppose that’s how easily the pendulum swings when you’re just a kid.
Within a few years of that ‘First Great Trestle Crossing’, the local adults figured out how dangerous it was to keep the skeletal remains of that bridge in place. I reckon the Hope Mill property owner recognized the potential financial liability the dilapidated trestle represented, so he made it disappear. We children claimed to be upset about its disappearance, but deep down inside I think we were all relieved to some extent because we knew we would never be dared to cross it again. Before long, we had collectively dragged a few of the old timbers that the demolition crew had left behind to make our own bridge, this one being much closer to the river’s surface. For me, the deeper significance of the bridge crossing was not in the physical danger it posed, but in the spiritual and mental challenge it represented. I remember it as the first time I tempted fate – the first time I challenged the devil to strike me down if that was his big plan. I see now that his plans were significantly bigger than I could have imagined back then. So, the devil laughed openly at my baby steps, and it’s likely God could see that he’d soon have his hands full trying to keep this young fool from wandering too far into the absolute black. In my understanding, God is always smiling though. The Great I Am bears an embarrassment born of the haplessness of our willful ways, and is thoroughly amused by us, just the same.
The Arkwright Bridge (built in 1888) is a couple miles downriver from the trestle in this story. Although it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, it will likely be one of the next disappearing bridges in rural Rhode Island. The bridge was closed to automobiles in 2011 and then closed to foot traffic in 2019, after the death of a local youth who was diving off the bridge with friends. (Wikipedia)
If I could have seen the recklessness of my actions early on, perhaps I might have saved myself a decade of increasingly painful hardship. But as the devil has been purported to say, “Where’s the fun in that?” Besides, if I hadn’t gone searching for the devil’s lair, I wouldn’t have this wonderful story to share with you all. Lucky for you, I am one that needs to learn the hard way. As a child I tended to rise to the challenge again and again, even if it meant sacrificing every last shred of self-preservation and esteem I could muster. I was intent on finding the source of absolute black, and when I did, I would start to beat the demons back down inside of it. When the supreme leaders of both the black and the white forces heard of my plans, all of the Universe enjoyed a great big belly laugh.
Fresh Perspectives Harvested ~ Post 1 – Introduction
If you are one who has never wrestled with low self-esteem, and if you’ve never felt unworthy or even felt a little less worthy than others, the topic of discussion in the following blog entry may seem trivial, and quite possibly, utterly meaningless. As such, it may be frustrating to read this in its tediousness. If it annoys you or you simply cannot relate to it, then it must mean that it isn’t time for you to read it, or at least not in this moment it isn’t. You are always free to surf away to another site, as I’m sure you are aware. The freedom of expression that I enjoy as being the sole author on this site is, in my own estimation, earned by being honest with myself and you all. So, this journal entry is where I intend to earn some of that freedom.
There were two separate occurrences that arose during the past week and each of them pointed directly to my continuing struggles with self-worth. I’ll only be discussing one of the two situations in detail on this blog, because the other one involves personal family matters, and therefore, private relationships. The peculiar thing is, that the family issue that happened later in the week, pointed to how far I’ve come on the journey toward healthy self-esteem and the other one, at the beginning of the week, showed me how far I have yet to go. Due, in part, to my history of painful experiences in dealing with self-worth issues, I’ve apparently adopted the automatic expectation that the events should have transpired the other way around. In other words, first would come the uplifting circumstance, and after that would come a lesson in humility to knock me down a couple of notches. Put me in my rightful place, so to speak. I’m beginning to understand that humility and self-esteem are not mutually exclusive, though. A person can have a high and healthy self-esteem, while also being humble in spirit, thus feeling no better and no worse than anyone else.
I chose this photo and the one at the top of the page because I felt as though they were representative of times when I was feeling good about myself and thinking that I had overcome all the problems concerned with low self-esteem. Read on, if you want to know my true feelings about these particular photographs.
Let’s back up to early last week. I started a new job last Monday as a second shift employee in a local warehouse. I arrived on time at 3:30 PM, because I’ve been conditioned to believe that promptness demonstrates overall integrity and an upstanding work ethic. Being prompt is also a courtesy that I asked for from the people that I employed at Moore Art Expressions. More often than not, I didn’t have to say anything about being on time though, because we had so much fun being there and being creative, that most employees preferred to come in early and leave late. At least, that’s the way I remember it. And yes, I am allowing myself that short digression. Now, back to last Monday. I was having some serious misgivings about accepting the warehouse job during the hours and days before I walked into the building, but I chalked that up to dreading the actual labor and fearing that I was too old to handle such a strenuous job. I am about to be fifty-nine years young, after all. In the past several months, I’ve remained focused on eating well and stretching and exercising daily, and as a result I’ve been feeling better physically than I have in the last decade. As I am writing this down tonight, I can see where my dread and fear were not only well founded, but more precisely they were intuitively realistic. The job description online didn’t attempt to gloss over any of the gory details of the work, so I knew reasonably well what to expect. I would be unloading boxes by hand from overseas containers, some in excess of 50-75 lbs., and loading them on to a conveyor belt in a non-climate-controlled environment. Many of you may be wondering whether I’ve lost my mind. Wondering why I would accept a menial labor job like this, especially considering the expertise I’ve attained in the molding and sculpture casting industry. As it often seems to be, the answer to that question is complicated, so I’ll come back around to it after describing what happened next.
Photo: Chris, Morderchai and Fred worked tirelessly in scorching Florida heat with me to cast 100 of these life-sized dog sculptures. It was a difficult learning curve to master the process, but we each became extremely skillful at performing our individual tasks as part of a unified team. In retrospect, I must conclude thateach of us personally enjoyed certain aspects of working on the project and we each considered other aspects of it, well, not so enjoyable.
Monday, my first night working at the warehouse, went fairly well, all things considered. The air inside the shipping containers was much hotter and more humid than I expected. The hot sun of the Savannah daytime hours had really settled in on the interior of the steel box, and the seawater that had seeped its way inside and saturated many of the cardboard boxes had no place to evaporate to, so as soon as I started moving, I started sweating. I kept moving. I was trying to pace myself, but I was also trying to prove myself. The conveyor belt was demanding to be fed and I kept feeding it. I unloaded 1,400 boxes to empty the first 40-foot container in about three hours. There were many times during the first load that I needed to cool my body and hydrate, so I walked outside the box and just inside the warehouse to take 30 second breathers. It was still very hot inside the warehouse, but rather than 110 degrees Fahrenheit it was more like 90. I finished off the shift on Monday moving from one container to the next, sometimes with help from coworkers when the boxes were oversized or heavy, and sometimes moving them on my own, until at last, the midnight hour arrived. I drove home for some highly anticipated sleep.
Photo: Another contract that I truly appreciated for seven enjoyable years during the Moore Art Expressions days, involved the restoration and upkeep of patinas on 24 monumental bronze sculptures for Raymond James Financial in Saint Petersburg, FL. The bronze sculpture photographed here is titled “Invocation” by the sculptor Buck McCain.
I returned on Tuesday afternoon, a little bit tired but still determined to prove my physical abilities to the team. As I got busy moving boxes, I had to keep reminding myself of the lessons I’ve learned over the course of thirty years in the blue-collar workforce. Lessons learned about keeping a reasonable pace no matter how fast others appear to be moving; about not comparing myself to others around me, they have their strengths and shortcomings just as I do; about not needing to prove myself to anyone other than myself; and most important of all, about taking breaks as often as you need to when you’re performing strenuous work in extreme temperatures. All of these thoughts were running through my mind, but my body seemed to have a different strategy it was running with regardless of my mind’s considerations. My body continued to lift and release boxes onto the conveyor belt. As many of you may have already surmised, I was soon overcome by heat exhaustion. My head was spinning, and I nearly passed out a number of times before they rang the bell for lunch break. I ate a little bit of food, but it tasted like poison, so I stopped eating and lay down on the picnic table bench for the remainder of the break. When my thirty minutes were up, I went right back to unloading the container where I had left off. Looking back on this it seems like complete foolishness. I was already having all of the symptoms of heat exhaustion and the potential of dying from heatstroke was growing more likely by the moment. I would like to report that I informed the warehouse managers of my condition and then I went home for the rest of the evening, but I did not. I would also like to tell you that I didn’t understand what was happening to me; that I did not know about heat exhaustion or the type of symptoms one might experience when they’re suffering from it. I would be lying to you all, if I made those false claims. Having worked in southwest Florida in extreme heat conditions for over a decade, I am fully aware of the symptoms and potential health risks that come along with heat exhaustion. Even having all this first-hand knowledge, I continued working hard until midnight and went home to get some rest.
I suppose this is a good place to end the narrative for today. Tomorrow, I’ll finish the story and explain why this incident and the other one involving my family were not only interrelated, but they seemed to be fully entwined, and together they rang out a resounding wakeup call to my body, mind and spirit.
My current feelings about the top two images – The top one was taken during the peak of our successful times at Moore Art Expressions. I had nine team members working with me to help raise us to that level, so I always felt a bit uneasy about being the public spokesperson when the media asked for an interview. As for the second photo – I swear to you, it was the photographer’s idea! I would have never agreed to it if he didn’t suggest that I might become endowed with superpowers following the shoot! In all seriousness though, I look back on those times with sincere gratitude and appreciation for all the good times we experienced together in the MAE studio!
Below is a link for those who would like to see more photos and videos of the work we did at Moore Art Expressions. The business website was taken down when I closed the business, but this Facebook page will give you an overview of the art we made there.
"Grand Providentia United" 