Month: January 2025

A knock on the door

“Feed me!” says the creative urge. “I need a dragon quest, or a search for a golden egg, or something.”

“How about a poem?” I ask.

“Pshaw, a snack,” it cries.

“I could scratch out a song,” I offer.

“I suppose.”

“How about a tasty blog post?”

“Boring! You do that all the time.”

“All right.” I take a deep breath. “It’s a bitter cold day in outer space. Ice would form instantly on the windows, except there’s no water out there. Suddenly they hear a knock on the door.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Well, the explorers.”

“What are they exploring?”

“Outer space. Duh!”

“Yes, but why?”

“To see what’s out there. Plus, there’s some disaster going on back on Earth, and a message was sent from this area of space saying the answer is out here.”

“Better. Go on,” the creative urge urges.

“Well, one explorer says to the other, ‘Holy moly, what was that?’ He’s the Dudley Do-Right character who’s in love with the lady scientist, but she likes the bad boy pilot. It’s the sweet botanist, who keeps the plants alive and supplying oxygen, who loves Dudley. It’s a tangled web.”

“Silly and distracting. What about the knock on the door?”

“They turn on the external cameras, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone or anything out there, but the knock comes again.”

“Go on.”

“An ethereal something seeps through the door and stands there, glowing, in front of them.”

“How did it knock if it’s ethereal?”

“It just knows how to do these things.”

“Someone’s going to ask.”

“Fine. It can make itself partly solid long enough to pick up things or knock on doors.”

“How did it know that humans have a custom of knocking on doors?”

“Oh, good heavens! Don’t you know anything about suspension of disbelief?”

“I don’t believe that’s really a thing.”

I stop and stare at the creative urge. Then I look more carefully.

“Why, you’re not the creative urge at all. You’re the self-editor! Shoo! Shoo!”

“Ah, you’re just a hack and a pretender anyway,” the self-editor scowls as it rushes away.

The creative urge walks into the room, yawning.

“That was a great nap,” it says. “What did I miss?”

“Well, this ethereal something-or-other just entered the space ship and was about to introduce itself and explain about the disaster back on Earth that led to this mission.”

“I love missions into space to save the world!”

“Me, too,” says I. “So you won’t believe what happens next.”

“Try me,” says the real creative urge.

Some days you’re the bug

I am a humbug. I make believe I do not need help and I am entirely self-sufficient, but that road leads to obscurity.

“The world will little note nor long remember what I say here,” I say, but deep inside I hope to say something that will resonate in 162 years. Will you remember me when I’m gone? Will you note what I say here? Or am I dust in the wind, a blip on the radar that barely registers, a bug flattened on the universe’s windshield?

It’s more likely the dust/blip/bug scenario is more accurate, and maybe that’s OK, if only something I say echoes down the road. Maybe someone will refuse to be afraid of the fear mongers. Maybe someone will say, “I once heard a guy remind me that Jesus said ‘Love your neighbor’ and added that we are all neighbors.” Or maybe, more likely, he won’t even remember the guy, only the message.

And that’s OK — the message is the important thing, not the messenger. Just as you shouldn’t shoot the messenger, neither should you lift him up as if he’s more important than the message.

Perhaps that’s the takeaway from this session: More important than remembering the messenger is the message itself, passing it along to the next generation to pass to the next after that.

A New Hope

Today brings something my parents never saw in their lifetimes — the inauguration of a guy who was elected president of the United States twice but non-consecutively. Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump are the only two people ever to achieve that feat.

I looked up Cleveland and found he won the popular vote three times, something that only Franklin Roosevelt also accomplished. It seems he was a classical liberal, which means he would be a political conservative in today’s environment. 

So today we again “meet the new boss.” The phrase is usually paired with “same as the old boss” thanks to Pete Townshend, but I wonder if that’s really true this time. I’d like to believe that it isn’t. Trump was not able to do much last time about his promise to drain the swamp. Certainly the swamp creatures frustrated, vilified and ultimately beat him by 2020, but this time he’s had eight years to study them more carefully, and he has the popular vote behind him this time.

I have some strong views about government and two wishes — that it become smaller and eventually go away, restoring our basic freedoms, and that it stop waging and sponsoring endless war across the planet. By recruiting the likes of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to ostensibly study ways to reduce government, and the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken veteran who advocates for peace, Trump gave me hope.

For the past four years faceless puppet masters have been operating the machinery of leviathan behind the figurehead of a confused old man, and Trump has appointed a small army of disruptors to lead the various departments of government that have so abused us. Whether they can succeed in ferreting out the worst offenders remains to be seen, but at least the puppet masters’ ghastly efforts have been made more visible and defeated at the ballot box.

Inauguration Day coincides this year with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating a man who advocated for freedom and human dignity through nonviolent civil disobedience. Like many before him and since, he was taken from us by violent means. As always, evil triumphed for a moment by taking a good man, but it utterly failed to kill the idea. 

Time will tell if the infestation in Washington, D.C., and other halls of power can ever be eradicated, but as long as the ideas of freedom and human rights survive, we can hope and pray.