An Update of Sorts (October 9, 2023)

It has indeed been a while since I've posted anything on Blogger.  I've had a TON of work before me, getting used to living in a rental after having maintained my mother's house for the past four decades or so.

I am only SO THANKFUL to everyone who has helped me survive this insanely vile period in my life, especially in light of that period having been precipitated by my mother's untimely death.

Since I moved out of the house and rented my first apartment on September 1, 2019, it was a struggle dealing with the trauma of having lost that home.  It didn't help that the apartment was a run-down joint on La Brea Avenue, between Venice and Washington, one of the busier, noisier, more congested, and more polluted areas in the city.  And the apartment had no dedicated parking, so I had to play musical parking spaces on the street.  The trauma of losing my mother's home eventually resulted in a serious lower-back re-injury that left parts of my left foot paralyzed as well as numb, back on January 3, 2020.  On February 5, 2020, I had to have surgery on two of my discs in order to correct the problem.  But after the post-surgery recovery (which was in my apartment, as they don't have hospital inpatient recovery for surgeries like this anymore), I couldn't get the orthopedic rehabilitation care I needed on account of the Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdowns in March.  On top of that, I lost my 2008 Mazda CX-7 to an engine fire on July 29, 2020, and couldn't buy a new vehicle because of the excess loan amount that still had to be paid off (and that will be the LAST time I buy anything from CarMax), which meant that I was at the mercy of Uber, Lyft, and the public transportation system for two years.  (And I mean, EXACTLY two years: I finally bought a van on July 29, 2022.)

On the upside, however, my employer allowed me to telecommute during the Pandemic, giving me a laptop with a built-in video camera.  And although there were no in-person poetry readings allowed, quite a few of the venues transferred themselves to the realm of Zoom meetings, which lead to an expanded audience and easier participation (well, for those of us with computers and smartphones).  Many of us who had already been veteran poets in the Los Angeles scene felt like we were getting a shot of adrenalin in the arm with Zoom audiences, and the Pandemic-Era Zoom scene led to a Renaissance in Spoken-Word Poetry.

In January 2021, when I was anticipating a better year of hunting for a new rental, I was infected with Covid on around January 5 and hospitalized from January 11 to January 24.  I was almost suffocating in that hospital bed, as every attempt at inhaling felt like eleven daggers were being rammed into each lung.  I probably caught the virus while I was working at a drive-through Covid testing site, which my employer required me to do at the time.  Afterwards, I got the vaccine in April, then resumed my efforts in finding another rental, which weren't that successful in that year.  The entire year was almost "the year that wasn't."

Eventually, when I really got myself together, I was able to find a better rental in May 2022.  Nevertheless, the 33 months I lived in that run-down apartment on La Brea Avenue were a much-needed awakening of sorts.  Outside of that house, I began to think on my own, and re-evaluate life on my own terms.  I've read a ton of new literature that I might not have considered in my former living situation, and it has forced me to re-evaluate my spirituality at the deepest levels.  What my former stepfather did to my late mother's legacy was already an abomination, especially after his involvement as a deacon and associate pastor in the church for so many decades.  But in light of his transgressions, coupled with the numerous insane horrors that have befallen Believers over the recent years, I have had no choice but to be more critical of the religion as a whole.  This pivot has resulted in quite a few new writings that I will eventually post here.  As for my other blog, "Miraculous Empowerment," there may not be any more activity there, and I might eventually take down the blog altogether.  I will not, however, be leaving the Christian faith anytime soon, unless I encounter overwhelming evidence that compels me to do so.  But these days, I cannot take things at face value anymore: I have to prove them and see whether or not they are true.

As for musical compositions and performances, I'm still trying to get back on my feet, so that's still a ways off in the future.  I'm just glad I'm still standing after all that has happened.

Coping with Betrayal, Eviction, and an Ongoing Disability Injury

I have been evicted from the only house I have known for the past 45 years.  It was my mother's house, where I was raised for most of my childhood.  My mother trusted my stepfather when she put his name on the title, but now that she has been dead for five years, he has viciously sold the place for profit, right out from under my feet: I have been sued by him and the "buyer," and I have to move out by August 31, 2019.  I have spent tons of money on this house over the decades, but I will not be reimbursed a single penny.  I am officially a member of the working-class poor.  I currently do not have the finances to move.  And I am still struggling with a Disability injury that continues to affect my health as well as my finances, thus further hurting my ability to move.  I seriously need financial help to keep from going homeless in my fifties, and with a Disability injury.  I have created a GoFundMe page for anyone who wants to donate:

https://www.gofundme.com/coping-with-eviction-and-disability

The only reason I am still alive today is my faith in God's love, but I am learning the hard way that even Believers have immense challenges.  I can't carry this cross alone.  ANY AMOUNT WOULD HELP.

The Art of Suicide Without Suicide

If your enemies have a huge gun aimed at your head,
the one thing you absolutely must not ever do
is hand them the bullets.
Your enemy will always be defined as the one person who firmly believes
that the Universe would be a far better place without you in it. Therefore,
your enemy will always be seeking the most effective ways
to wipe both you and everything pertaining to you out of existence,
plain and simple. That is why giving your enemy a loaded gun
would be just as fatal to you as committing suicide with that gun.
There are numerous methods of committing suicide
without actually committing suicide.
You commit suicide when you knowingly and willingly
live the wrong lifestyle or marry the wrong person,
and it eventually kills you. Some suicides can occur in a split second,
while others take decades. Sometimes,
death hits and kills a person all at once, while other times,
death slowly and meticulously unravels a person over countless years.
So then who is the real enemy?
Is it the one who tries to put you to death without any real cause?
Or is it death himself, the very one who
has made a mockery of all love and dignity and virtue and righteousness and
truth and tradition and romance and commitment and sentimentality and
piety and hope by dragging them all to the grave and
mercilessly reducing them all to maggots and worms and ashes and dirt and
bones and hopeless emptiness? Why do people commit suicide?
Is it because they can only see life as nothing more than
the long road that always leads to death,
with suicide simply being a convenient shortcut?
Are we handing death the bullets
because we've forgotten how to dream those precious dreams of
faith, hope, unconditional love, and immortality?
Just because a people haven't had a victory for tens of thousands of years
does not mean that victory is impossible.
And just because a people have never triumphed at all,
it does not mean that triumph is unattainable.
Nevertheless, someone needs to defeat death today,
right here and now, by successfully reversing his icy grip and
completely restoring those who have wrongfully and prematurely died.
And someone needs to demonstrate that there is an afterlife
and another Universe after our loved ones die. Otherwise,
why try to stop your loved ones from committing suicide
when life is nothing more than the long road to death,
and suicide is simply the shortcut?
Why not simply give your enemy the bullets,
and just get it over with?
Sometimes, suicide veils herself
and takes the long road.

Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

Slingshot

Trying to solve these modern-day problems
using "that old-time religion"
makes about as much sense
as putting new wine into old wineskins,
or attacking an ironclad battleship with wooden bows and arrows.
I don't care what god you serve:
do you really think David's simple slingshot would stand a chance
against a Goliath who has an AK-47 in his right hand, an RPG in his left,
and bulletproof body-armor from head to toe? I don't think so!
In this modern-day technologically advanced society,
we are experiencing moral and ethical challenges
that our forefathers and foremothers couldn't have even imagined,
and the Biblical misconceptions the church could get away with long ago
are completely ripping Christians to shreds today,
while the world looks on and increasingly mocks both Jesus and His followers
with each passing day. Stop trying to get away with Dispensationalism,
since that moth-eaten theology clearly supports a fickle, inconsistent,
changing GOD,
while the Bible itself says, "I am the LORD, I change not,"
and "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever."
Stop trying to say that the entire Bible is the WORD of GOD
when even Jesus Himself had to edit the very Scriptures
during His Sermon on the Mount,
teaching people to love their enemies instead of hating them,
and altogether negating the "eye for an eye" and "swearing an oath" parts.
Stop using the Book of Genesis as the undisputed origin of humanity
when even Jesus Himself never mentioned Adam by name,
always referring to Himself as "the Son of man," never "the Son of Adam."
Stop teaching people that Satan rules over Hell and lives in Hell
when Satan isn't even in Hell, but is instead the prince of the powers of the air.
Stop saying that Satan resembles that sabbatical goat called Baphomet
when the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel called him Lucifer,
the archangel of musical glory and sublime beauty,
who was ejected from Heaven for willfully dreaming about
being like the MOST HIGH, dreaming about being made in the Image of GOD,
in other words, COVETING WHAT THE AVERAGE MAN AND WOMAN
ALREADY ARE. They know not, neither will they understand,
and they senselessly march onward like Christian soldiers in their own darkness,
which is why all of the earth's foundations are horrendously out of course.
We desperately need to assume our rightful place as gods,
as Sons and Daughters of the MOST HIGH,
before we all die like mortal men
and fall like one of the blind princes.
We desperately need to do away with David's old worn-out slingshot
and get with the times
before it's too late.
---
Every cause has a unique effect,
and every effect has a unique cause.
Nothing happens by random chance.

Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

The Energy of Pain

What would happen to me
if I focused every last ounce of my pain, my sorrow,
my grief, my mourning, my loss, my loneliness, and my torment
onto one place, one shape, one pattern most desired?
Would I finally see miraculous magic in my life?
Or would I go irreversibly mad, or suffer a nervous breakdown,
or witness the catastrophic collapse of my physical health?
I once heard that the most intense supernatural power
comes from the most intense personal emotion. And oftentimes,
that emotion is pain. I also heard that the entire Universe
consists of only two things, energy and pattern,
and that one cannot exist without the other.
How can I even begin to channel the overwhelming grief
I have just suffered when I prematurely lost both of my parents and a dear friend
over the past two years, grief that could produce more energy
than a trillion Hiroshima-type A-bombs?
Do I even dare try to channel it,
at the risk of being driven irretrievably insane?
Sometimes,
the pain is so great,
I just want to sit there,
in my bedroom, in the silence,
and simply shut down.
Sometimes,
I am just too tired
to shed yet another lonely tear.
Sometimes,
I wonder how I could have lived for more than half a century
without having created any kind of enduring legacy,
as if I've been living a wretched lie all along,
betraying my true self with every last step I took.
I sit there and wonder, where did I go wrong?
I keep asking myself, how many wrong turns did I make?
My patriotism died in 2013, when I learned the awful truths about America.
Then my mother dies in 2014, then my father dies in 2015,
and then one of my dear friends, who used to be my girlfriend,
dies in 2016, this year, as if the pain wasn't through with me yet.
And Los Angeles gets more and more overcrowded by self-absorbed outsiders
who just moved here yesterday, and the traffic congestion keeps getting worse,
and the cost of living keeps rising while the quality of life keeps falling,
and the pollution keeps worsening,
and the competition keeps getting more vicious,
and the water supply keeps dwindling,
and the number of power failures keeps increasing,
and the overall insanity of overpopulation keeps drowning out all sense of
dignity, kindness, peace. I cannot recall the last time
I had a good night's sleep.
And I keep lingering on the idea
of cultivating my power
from a pain deep enough to detonate supernovae and cause whole galaxies
to spin. If I just simply embraced this immense, nightmarish colossus,
and allowed my tears to flow without reason and without end,
would I finally have peace after all?
Or would I finally lose my natural mind
after all?

Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

The Road to Hell

Good intentions cannot undo an evil truth.
America was meant to be a nation of liberty and justice for all,
but her very foundation consists of European invaders,
violently and unjustly taking the land from the Native Americans
who were already there, and then kidnapping and enslaving countless Africans
to build upon and maintain the land that was stolen from the Native Americans.
So then how can a nation champion liberty and justice
while standing on a foundation of slavery and injustice?
Good intentions cannot undo an evil truth.
Any nation that legislates free speech, free press, free religion, and free protest
will inevitably suffer the corruption inherent in all human nature,
in that every individual who is free to soar to the noblest heights
will always be violently resisted
by every individual who is also free to sink to the most deplorable depths;
and as it is with individuals, so it is with whole communities, whole cities,
and whole states: every nation divided against itself is brought to ruin,
and every family divided against itself cannot stand.
So as long as the freely inclusive are violently resisted by the freely racist,
and the forward progressives are violently resisted by the backward traditionalists,
and the globalists are violently resisted by the isolationists,
and the environmentalists are violently resisted by the industrialists,
and the freely generous are violently resisted by the staunchly selfish,
and the increasingly liberal are violently resisted by the increasingly conservative,
America is inevitably doomed. Indeed, the very democracy,
meant to prevent a totalitarian government from grinding freedom to powder,
will still wind up being violently ground to powder under the burdensome weight
of its own merciless division, an internal conflict fuelled by human nature itself.
Good intentions cannot undo an evil truth.
It is no mystery that good intentions have always been
the finest gold bricks ever used to create the road to Hell.
And every last government founded by humanity
paves the same path with that many more gold bricks
while marching on towards the same age-old oblivion.
Countless ruins tell the same sad tale. And all truths,
both good and evil,
remain ever steadfast in their silent proclamation,
regardless of the countless generations of propaganda ministers
consistently bent on gas-lighting the lies of the day into the hearts and minds
of the current masses. In the end, their angry threats are always
meaningless
on the road to Hell, the final path every nation must travel,
an infernal highway most spectacularly paved
with the best of intentions.
--
It is never enough.

Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved

Hobbies versus Careers, 1983 to 2017

        There is an extreme difference between a career and a hobby. While you may love doing a hobby, you were born to do a career. If you were born with an innate gift for medicine and healing, then your career is in the medical profession. If you are innately good at leadership and law, then you were meant to have a political career. If you are innately gifted with understanding the Bible, prayer, and the Christian church, then your career is that of a theologian. If you were born with a talent for singing, then you have a career as a vocalist. The list of careers is practically endless, but what defines your career is your innate gift or set of gifts. On the other hand, if you love medicine and healing, or leadership and law, or singing, or any other activity that you were not innately gifted to perform, then those activities are hobbies, not careers, plain and simple. A career is what you were born to fulfill, while a hobby is what you enjoy doing without ever having had any innate gift for it.
        That being said, I am currently facing a dilemma that has been thirty-four years in the making, primarily because I spent thirty-four years violating the principle I just illustrated in the previous paragraph of this writing. When I graduated from High School in the Spring of 1983, it was no mystery that I was born to be an artist, being innately gifted in creative writing, dramatic theater, graphic arts, and music, with the strongest of these gifts being singing. I had inherited the gift of singing from my father, who had inherited the same gift from his father. But instead of choosing a career that reflected my innate gifts, I adamantly insisted that I belonged in the field of computers, which was still largely in its infancy back in 1983, in that there were no handheld smartphones and no public Internet yet. When I started college in 1983, I went into Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Never mind the fact that USC also had (and still has) an outstanding School of Music, where I could have easily studied Classical and Jazz Vocals. I insisted on studying how to design computer circuits, something that would have been one of my more interesting hobbies, but something I was never gifted at doing. That first year was a disaster, and in the Spring of 1984, I was unable to maintain the scholarships that covered USC's outrageously expensive tuition fees, and was thus forced to transfer to a less expensive college. I chose the California State University in Northridge, not because I actually knew what I was doing, but because one of my High School friends started there. Still thinking that I'd be rich in the computer field, I majored in something computer-related. But because I had absolute disdain for CSUN's engineering program, I chose Computer Science, which dealt with the development of software, programming languages, and operating systems. While I was introduced to computer programming at twelve years of age, it was still a hobby, and not an innate gift. As such, I spent another eight-and-a-half years working on what should have been a four-year degree, and when I finally graduated in the Fall of 1992, I had a C+ grade-point average. And all that time in college, I kept trying to indulge in the artistic gifts I was innately born to pursue. I had it all wrong: I was pursuing a hobby as though it should have been a career, while treating what should have been my real career as though it were nothing more than a mere hobby, and I was suffering because of this.
        When I finally graduated in the Fall of 1992, I was desperate for a job. Unlike my fellow Computer Science students at CSUN, who lined up their job opportunities and employer interviews BEFORE they graduated, I was too busy struggling with one Computer Science class after another, having to retake the classes I kept failing. So when I left college, I could only find jobs that were actually beneath my Bachelor's Degree, and this went on for almost a year. By the Fall of 1993, I was hired as a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration's NISC Team. ("NISC" stood for "NAS Implementation Support Contract," and "NAS" stood for "National Airspace Systems.") I worked as a CAD Draftsman. Although the contract was supposed to last for seven years, the time-allotment was cut in half for a good number of us, and I was laid off in the Spring of 1997. While I was there, one of the innate gifts in my artistic suite, poetry, began to blossom as spoken-word poetry in 1996, so when I was laid off in 1997, I spent all of that year and a good part of 1998 writing and performing spoken-word poetry. Even though I was a "starving artist" doing the best I could on Unemployment, I never felt more alive and invigorated than when I was on-stage reciting the deep, strong, gentle, passionate, social, political, intelligent, sexual, spiritual things I wrote. I was being myself. Nevertheless, the real challenge came when my Unemployment funds ran out in 1998, and my income dropped to zero. Instead of coming to my senses and acknowledging that I was born to be an artist, and not to be an Information Technology professional, I shoved my artistic life back into the hobby-closet and sought another IT job, this time as a Systems Analyst with the City of Los Angeles, beginning at the Public Works' Bureau of Accounting in the Fall of 1998. The job was still a struggle, not just to maintain my knowledge of computers, but also to relate with groups of people I was never supposed to meet in the first place. My artistic temperament, emotional as it was, eventually got me into trouble with those co-workers, primarily because such temperament simply didn't belong in that kind of work environment. I suffered disciplinary action during the Summer of 2001, where I was also shut out of the office and placed on leave for three months. While I was on leave, I indulged in even more artistic endeavors, including music composition on a MIDI keyboard, sketching and computer graphics, and (of course) spoken-word poetry. When I was allowed to return to work, my co-workers and supervisors treated me with even more contempt than ever before, and they let me know in no uncertain terms that I was despised beyond measure. Except for the handful of people that actually befriended me, the rest were on a mission to erase me completely. My supervisors then forced me to do heavy work without back support, and in the Spring of 2002, I injured my lower back on the job. While I was on Disability, I hired an attorney to defend me. And I was very glad I hired that attorney, because in the Fall of 2006, when I returned to the same job with the work-restrictions imposed by my attorney, the same supervisors violated those restrictions, forced me to do similar difficult work, and re-injured my lower back in the early Spring of 2007, placing me back on Disability. I was on Disability for a total of seven years, and I was being paid as much as I would have been paid while on the job. And while I was on Disability for those seven years, I had the unbridled freedom to pursue my artistic talents once again. I composed several albums on that MIDI keyboard, thoroughly indulged myself in sketching and computer graphics, and wrote numerous new poems to recite as spoken word. But even then, in all that time, I still didn't pursue any of my artistic talents as an actual career, and the talent I gave the least attention to was singing. Instead, fuelled by my misinterpretations of a book I was reading called "Rich Dad Poor Dad," written by Robert Kiyosaki, I took on Vocational Rehabilitation to learn how to be a business entrepreneur, yet another field I was simply not gifted with. When I started this training in 2008, it was around the time a major economic deficit hit the entire nation, forcing many small businesses to permanently close their doors. While I was writing my business plan as my final examination for the online course I was taking, I reacted to the deficit, I froze, I lost my determination, I kept drawing blanks, I flunked out of the entire Vocational Rehabilitation program, and I went back to work for the City of Los Angeles in the Fall of 2009, but in an entirely different department than where I started in 1998. I regained my Systems Analyst job at the City's Information Technology Agency, where I started on the Citywide Helpdesk and then planned on moving up later on. But my plans at ITA were cut short when the same wave of economic hardship that hit the private sector in 2008 finally struck the government sector in the Fall of 2010. ITA was horrendously downsized, I was laid off, and per City Policy, I was transferred back to the same group of people I started with back in 1998, Public Works. The only difference was the Bureau in Public Works. In 1998, I started with the Bureau of Accounting. This time, in 2010, it was the Bureau of Sanitation. And from there, I was transferred to Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant, where I have been working to this day.
        My IT career has all but dead-ended here at Hyperion. In addition to being surrounded by wastewater chemists, who were experts in a field that was even more alien to me than that of computers, I was still at best mediocre when it came to IT. And because the daily commute to and from Hyperion has gradually worsened as traffic congestion continues to mercilessly and exponentially increase, I spend far more time and energy dealing with the road than I ever do dealing with my job responsibilities or my increasingly obscured artistic talents, which (talents) were once again shoved back into the hobby-closet. Ever since 1983, I labored under the horrific misapprehension that making a ton of money and getting rich were the be-all and the end-all. That materialistic greed-centered thinking spurred me on to going after the wrong college degree, the wrong career, and the wrong Vocational Rehabilitation training. I should have realized early on that my value as a human being has absolutely nothing to do with being rich, and that my innate talents have absolutely nothing to do with insane quests for wealth. I should have sought after a career that reflected my natural-born gifts, not because it was the most financially profitable thing to do, but because it was the RIGHT thing to do. Nevertheless, these truths really didn't begin to sink into my inner paradigm until my mother suddenly died on May 27, 2014, and then my father died on February 1, 2015. The death of both parents, immediately followed by the death of my good friend and church elder Robert Holeman on January 30, 2016, and then the death of my dear friend and ex-girlfriend Jewel Allen on June 16, 2016, forced me to seriously rethink everything about my life, and I mean EVERYTHING. (Before my father died, he made me promise that I would use my singing voice in a professional manner, and I will honor that promise, even if it's the last thing I ever do.) I have learned the hard way, costing me thirty-four years of my natural life, that only a fool chases after wealth and riches. You are NEVER supposed to chase after wealth and riches: when you live the life you were born to live, and fulfill the talents you were born to fulfill, wealth and riches will chase after you. In fact, the more you chase after wealth and riches, the POORER you will become, first in your very soul, and then in your material possessions (or lack thereof). I am not saying that one shouldn't learn how to be wise with his or her money, nor am I saying that one shouldn't be financially literate. What I am saying is that one should not ever pursue money as though it were the most important thing in life, and that one should not ever worship money like a god.
        Ultimately, I have learned that the talents I was born with, and neither the talents that looked awesome to me nor the talents I thought would make me rich, should have been the talents that shaped my career. All of the awesome-looking talents and the so-called wealth-building talents, none of which came naturally to me, were only meant to be nothing more than hobbies. Now, as I move forward, I have the enormous responsibility of uprooting the thirty-four years of my adult life built upon a computer hobby that should not have ever been my career, and then replacing that corrupt foundation with one consisting of my natural-born vocal, musical, artistic, poetic, literary, and dramatic talents as my permanent career. I seriously need to achieve this before I get too old to find my wife and have children of my own. And I absolutely cannot afford to be set in my ways, since nearly all of them are based on a thirty-four-year-old error.
        (I have also come to realize that my foundational dilemma may have far more profoundly esoteric consequences than I had originally imagined, especially with regards to current events in American politics. In my recent studies of the Seven Hermetic Principles, I learned that the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence not only applies to "above" and "below," but also to past and future, inner being and outer being, and so on. Coupling that with the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism, I came to the profound realization that my dilemma, allowing selfishness and greed to plant my adult career on the wrong foundation, has become identical to America's dilemma, in that this entire nation originally allowed the selfishness and greed of European colonialism to plant her on a foundation of white supremacy, land theft, and slavery. And even as I am struggling against my old foundation in my efforts to plant myself onto a new and correct one, America is struggling against her old foundation of racism, bigotry, and white supremacy in her efforts to plant herself onto a new and correct foundation of equality, human rights, civil rights, mutual respect, brotherhood for all, and sisterhood for all. Nevertheless, with regards to President Donald Trump, the Republican-majority Congress, and the Republican-majority Supreme Court, all of which appear to be an outright backlash against the previous Obama Administration, this may also be a warning to me that during this struggle of change, my old foundation may cause me as much bitter, hostile torment as America's old foundation is causing her.)

Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved