shaggy

Enlightenment

1 paz

1 Paz

Blood poured from several openings. There is always too much blood and gore. The physical becomes more and more synthetic over time. The physical expands and grows into a larger and larger being, encompassing everything. The physical becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The sights and sounds of all the accessories put the poor little fool into fits. The lights and sounds spin around and around his head. And then there are the smells and the feelings that swallow him up and overwhelm him. There also is the madness of the vagaries of life that eat away at him little by little, one bite after another come for him like a school of piranha to eat and devour his little world.

You are without support, now. You are not resistant to the hegemony of the distinctive forms of the touchstones of critique. You are cynical and irreverent as you place your hopes on grimly evolved insipient solutions that no one can swallow. Alienated from the million eyes, you have become a creative installation of deviance and bogus values. With your blank bored demeanor, you absorb the impish and sweltering totality of negative choices of self-loathing and frittering your life away.

Kicker was jealous of her happy eyes. Her eyes mocked him with every twinkle. They taunted him to reach into his bag of severity. He pulled forth from his inner being all the evil he could muster. He fought back tears as he pulled the rope from his pocket. Kicker was shaking with the fear of what was about to happen. He knew that he was a puppet being manipulated by unseen strings. He coiled the rope around her neck like a snake. The rope was an inanimate thing that wanted life. The rope wanted Sushi’s life. She lived on this earth long enough and now she had to give it up to the rope. She had to surrender her life to the snake.

I wouldn’t say he is stupid, but gullible. He has a smothered flat face with a constant blank look upon it and his eyes seem almost lifeless. He always had difficulty making sense out of the larger world. He is constantly stoned on phenobarbital, diazepam, hydrocodone, and oxycodone. He has been in and out of a blackout for a good part of three years. The result of this is that his mind is pretty frayed. He is manning the helm of a sinking ship, a fool with no hope. It took him a total of nine weeks to organize his thoughts into some sort of meaningful pattern that would allow him to go on living. He couldn’t change his mind, once he believed there was no convincing him. He would filter out all evidence to the contrary. He was a stone cold believer no matter how foolish the belief.

He thought he could escape, but he couldn’t. The trap had been set long ago, before he was ever born. We can see them coming, we always do. The trick is to pick the right one. There are so many to choose from. The weak and the spineless are in abundance on this earth.

When I said that you were backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic, I watched your eyes grow wider and wider as if they were juxtapositions of the parts of yourself. I leaned away from you repulsed by the dismantling of the clearly repressed and unifying obsessions of your face-stuffed wishful thinking that borders on the absurdist boundaries of hell wand high-water.

It’s no fun living an ugly life and to be so lonely. I’m not that bad, just misunderstood. If only I could explain things better, then maybe they would be able to see things my way. Kicker moves down lower to feel the psychic waves that are emanating from her. Each one jolts him as it hits his body and moves on. He never once thinks if someone else could feel this. You could say he lacked empathy, especially for his victims.

It was a beautiful expression of the brutal and extreme. The fools were standing at attention, composed and smiling, unaware of the evil that will soon befall them, fresh meat waiting for their rotation on the grill. They stand there almost unconscious, swelling with the unknown. They are like boxes waiting to be opened. They want to be inspired, to be filed with something they can’t understand. They come here out of boredom and just plain curiosity. They think it must all be some big elaborate joke. A couple of them look around for the TV cameras. This must be a hoax for some comedy show. Some of them are too tired to really give a shit. Soon they will be slumped over with their mouths open and their bodies twitching. Their stare will be affixed with a perpetual look of puzzlement. Death approaches like the magic of darkness, quick, simple, and effective. His is plugged in to the darkness, a complex nest of wires sprout from his body. The electric hum inside his head is the only thing that is keeping his fragile persona together. Suddenly whirling and stabbing at anything and everything within his line of sight.

He needs to feel that he is in control. He wants to be calling the shots. Rocky is used to getting his way; I guess he is sort of spoilt in that way. He will pout like a little baby if he doesn’t get his way. He did seem oddly possessed, especially when he laughed like a machine gun. How do you answer someone who claims to be your death incarnate? What do you do when someone smiles at you in a psychotic way? There are no rules to guide your behavior. I never received any training on this. There was no way to prepare myself. You wrap yourself in this pseudo security and hope that nothing touches you. But, I have been touched.

Saint Nicholas

On 26 August 1071 Romanus IV, Emperor of the Byzantine Empire (reigned 1068–1071), faced Sultan Alp Arslan of the Seljuk Turks (reigned 1059–1072) in the Battle of Manzikert. The battle ended in humiliating defeat and capture for Romanus. As a result the Empire temporarily lost control over most of Asia Minor to the invading Seljuk Turks. The Byzantines would regain its control over Asia Minor during the reign of Alexius I Comnenus (reigned 1081–1118). But early in his reign Myra was overtaken by the Turks. Nicholas' tomb in Myra had become a popular place of pilgrimage. Because of the many wars and attacks in the region, some Christianswere concerned that access to the tomb might become difficult. For both thereligious and commercial advantages of a major pilgrimage site, the Italian cities of Venice and Bari vied to get the Nicholas relics.^[3] Taking advantage of the confusion, in the spring of 1087, sailors from Bari in Apulia seized part of the remains of the saint from his burial church in Myra, over the objections of the Orthodox monks. Returning to Bari, they brought the remains with them and cared for them. The remains arrived on 9 May 1087. There are numerous variations of this account. In some versions those taking the relics are characterized as thieves or pirates, in others they are said to have taken them in response to a vision wherein Saint Nicholas himself appeared and commanded that his relics be moved in order to preserve them from the impending Muslim conquest. Currently at Bari, there are two churches at his shrine, one Roman Catholic and one Orthodox.

The church of San Nicolò al Lido (Venice), hosts half of Nicolas' relics

Sailors from Bari collected just half of Nicholas' skeleton, leaving all the minor fragments in the grave. These were collected by Venetian sailors during the first crusade and brought to Venice, where a church to St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors, was built on the Lido. This tradition was confirmed in two scientific investigations of the relics in Bari and Venice, which revealed that the relics in the two cities belong to the same skeleton.^[20][21]

It is said that in Myra the relics of Saint Nicholas each year exuded a clear watery liquid which smells like rose water, called manna (or myrrh), which is believed by the faithful to possess miraculous powers. After the relics were brought to Bari, they continued to do so, much to the joy of the new owners. Vials of myrrh from his relics have been taken all over the world for centuries, and can still be obtained from his church in Bari. Even up to the present day, a flask of manna is extracted from the tomb of Saint Nicholas every year on 6 December (the Saint's feast day) by the clergy of the basilica. The myrrh is collected from a sarcophagus which is located in the basilica vault and could be obtained in the shop nearby. The liquid gradually seeps out of the tomb, but it is unclear whether it originates from the body within the tomb, or from the marble itself; since the town of Bari is a harbor, and the tomb is below sea level, there are several natural explanations for the manna fluid, including the transfer of seawater to the tomb by capillary action.^[22]

In 1993, a grave was found on the small Turkish island of Gemile, east of Rhodes, which historians believe is the original tomb of Saint Nicholas.^[23] On 28 December 2009, the Turkish Government announced that it would be formally requesting the return of St. Nicholas's skeletal remains to Turkey from the Italian government.^[24][25] Turkish authorities have asserted that St. Nicholas himself desired to be buried at his episcopal town, and that his remains were illegally removed from his homeland.