Storytelling One.

Once upon a time, 
Alexis got tired of reading and watching all the stories of others, so she decided to write her own down. She was ill with the influenza of 2010 when she decided to do this, or that is what she guessed she had, as the incubation time was spot on in accordance to a rather rushed visit to the Denver Museum of Modern Art. Because Alexis acknowledged the wisdom of George Carlin and decided that a little dirt never hurt anybody, she failed to wash her thumbs when the social hand-washing check was instilled by the fellow minions in the restroom. Little did Alexis know, two days later when she decided to try her new spicy dreadlock soap that her damp hair would result in a low core temperature while sleeping, thus resulting in her present condition of general malaise.

Alexis was on a break. A leave of absence from school, glazed over with an interesting acronym, “TOP.” This was a typical systematic approach to condensing life issues into something more manageable, lessening the emotional blow of taking a “time out” into something which sounded proactive, successful, positive. Newspeak has infiltrated this culture into every level. She knew people who wouldn’t laugh at jokes but instead uttered, “LOL! OMG you are so funny!” It’s a miracle there are so many humans on this planet, still breathing and breeding.

Breathing and breeding, that’s what we do here. We don’t think or act or speak out, or truly stand up for things, nope. We just eat, shit and fuck.

So one night, after chewing on a major familial dilemma for about a half year, jaw sore from the grinding down of tooth enamel, mind fatigued with the continued guilt and the lack of interest in anything other than moving on, Alexis decided hiding was no longer the best course of action. You are either running from something, spectating, or committed. Time to commit, she said to herself.

I live in America. Not much pride here in the house of Alexis. I used to have a lot of pride, hope, belief in the Dream. But I’ve seen too much woundedness to admit this is the greatest place on earth. I know that what really goes on behind our four borders is more about covering up the wounds than being materialistic. It’s all profoundly spiritual, you see. These borders we build with our wealth are nothing more than a wall built to keep the awareness of depravity out. It is really just an illusion to keep ourselves from the reality regarding the greed of our materialism and our monotheistic cultural approaches to this world and what these choices have done to our planet.

My culture is the spoiled rich kid who stole all the food on Spaceship Earth, just as we were all hoping to find a safe haven via technological advance. Yep, so no pride here. Not any longer, in fact, I pity My-Fellow-Americans more than anything.

I’m sure some family members will be fairly pissed when they read this, as they likely will. I’ll be likened to some socialist fuck that everyone thinks they understand to be a socialist but really is just a capitalist parading as a dictator, or some such nonsense. I’m probably not making any sense, this whole illness thing messes with capacities to write. So much editing will occur. Or not. Meh.

Alexis woke from her Netflix slumber to the sound of her neighbour drunk-tripping up the stairs and stumbling into his apartment.
Alexis threw out a cruelly directed attack: At least I’m not hiding in a bottle of ale.
Which, upon utterance, became an instantaneous reminder of her own current coping method of hiding in hours and hours of cinema.
This allowed Alexis to remember she is no different from the wounded drunkard, her cocoon is just more subtle and socially acceptable.

This place is full of the wounded, who wake from their restless slumber to the sound of a violent alarm, wake up! WAKE UP!! WAKE UP!!! and chase the dollar!
Chase the dollar, food must be on the plate, but don’t take leave, don’t breathe and ask for a holiday, or the time to handle the guts dangling from that wound you have in your centre.

We are taught to ignore the bleeding of our souls, because merely looking at it isn’t manly, or brave, but weak. So most people wander the highways to and from work, visceral tendrils hiding underneath their snappy suits and ties, pretending nothing is the matter. That is, in fact, the very reason we have trashed this place, and have built our wall of material around us. A blanket to cushion the blow that we are no different from the beggar in Calcutta, or the tenant farmer in Africa, or the Chinese whore in Shanghai.

Alexis was told she was different. Different from all the normals, less cool. She was without doubt insane. Yes, definitely, definitely insane. Crazy enough to consider suicide, which was of course, unnatural. I mean, why would anyone want to do that? Why would anyone want to wipe their smirk off the face of this planet, upon discovering the reality that the world they believed to be real was an illusion? That the United States of America broke dreams, not made them?

Yes, insane for seeing it, and most people who are sensitive to those kinds of things are painfully reminded of the reality of the world each day. Sometimes those who are hyper sensitive to the pain of the world wake up before they are ready for such harshness. Alexis woke earlier than most people in America do, but later than the mean of the global populace. This story isn’t going so well, she thinks as she writes this, but she has to begin somewhere, and she has begun this story millions of times.