"Be one with your delusion."

My apologies for being away from Blip for a few days. I had a packed weekend, with a half-day meditation retreat, work on a video (see yesterday), a brilliant dharma talk by the very wise Gyokuko Carlson, some precious uninterrupted time with Sue, and a bit of fiction writing I needed to finish. My fiction is influenced, I think, by the Blipfoto changes, by Kurosawa's Ikiru, and by Gyokuko's very moving talk on delusion. Remember, this is FICTION and is not intended to resemble any real person anywhere, living or dead.

When I opened my eyes on this day, even the voices of children in the street sounded like so many harmonicas, laughter broken by heat waves. My shirt stuck to my chest, my penis stuck to my thigh, and my mattress sank damp and hot beneath my old, my aching bones. Yet delusion held me in its long embrace. We have been together since 1969, my delusion and me, we have traveled beside each other so comfortably through these decades of slow dying that we are indivisible now.

I was a whimpering puppy of twenty-four when the corporation gave me what they called a choice: I could write for them or die. They thought they drew a line between me and my idealistic comrades that day, and I said to myself, “I will do what I must do for now, I will be practical under these circumstances in order to survive, but when the turning comes, when we are set free from these tyrants, I will tell the story. I will bear witness.” Such was my delusion. 

I think the day did come when the corporation was deposed, when justice was served, when a generation of survivors came forward to tell the truth. But I can’t be sure because before that happened, if it happened, I was sent here. I had lost my voice. Throat cancer. Surgery excised my tongue. I could still think, but selective dementia began to take hold of my brain. I could no longer trust myself. I could no longer trust my memories nor the analysis stewed in that pot of boiling newspaper and glue that was all the thousands of words I had written on their behalf. I agreed, “If they buy my seed, I will sing their song.” That went on decade upon wretched decade. Now an image will arise. Is it a memory? Or is it another spin from the spin-master I once was? I was a reciter of slogans, a champion of double-speak. I crafted mission statements and educational objectives. Now I am mute.

That’s not all. There is a hollow in my chest, a rib detached, an organ shrunk. The scars from my idealism bind my fingers like tight webs so I cannot type. I have become the message I was paid to purvey, the smiling yes, the closed mouth, the scummy eyes that will no longer see. The corporate story, and mine, is safe with me. I sit and gaze out the window, entombed in confusion. I was a practical man. I did what I had to do, my best. That is my mantra. I always did my best. This shell of the man I was, remains a while yet, gazing out a cloudy window into a fog of my own creating.