Yes, the outdoors are profound. Nothing like a windy rainstorm to check one's world-dominating ego. And these kids... drug addicts, ADD, cutters, GENIUSES all of them in their own way rejecting utterly the world as it exists and ending up alone in the woods to claim their souls from the abyss of negativity and self-destruction. I sometimes wonder as I teach them whether they, or I, are learning the most. I teach them some stuff, but they show me a world that is to be, a much more valuable item. I recommend to anyone who is caught up in their day-trading nightmare of four walls and an assumed comfortable bed, video screens on demand and the essential oils of bought and sold gourmet digestion, to take along hard look at the wind in the trees. It does my heart an amazing good as I strengthen my emotions and body on the trail with these amazing young minds as they tear away from the easy access of cellular distractions, easy meal transactions at drive-throughs, video game fantasies, and the cool brief comfort of designer drug escapes. I recommend such tuning out to all as the world slowly degrades as it upgrades.

Last week I hiked 16 miles over a mountain in two days with a bunch of ADHD addicted teenagers. Their struggle was epic, mine like a scene of dream footage. Watching their attitudes about life change as they succeeded was profound. From negative addicted jonesing to positive sober motivation as the mountain passed underfoot really made me realize why I do what I do. It's not for money, nor is it for the incredible shape my body is getting. It's for the future, and man it is draining, painful, chaotic, and dangerous. Since I'm a poetic, druidic type on here I guess you might call that a metaphor.

Deepness, seriousness, realness, grace, understanding, they twinkle as we belch and grovel like newts. I hope to hell I can some day live up to the reflection I give these kids who are our future here. Okay, so now we may have some balls in our hand to play like big daddy's in a bad dream, but I am hopeful that the real will win out, the money peter out like the soda.
It's hard to explain, really. I feel like the Australian Aborigine letting his tribe die out in order to preserve an angel. The demons we let fly with casual passive/aggressive regularity are like cheap convenience store snacks. Look at them as they buzz like flies in the cheap lunch atrium of late eighties sky-lights and mall-like echoing emptiness.
I know it's cheesy, but damn. Tolkien imagined for usmuch better. Marble and crystal, gossamer and glass..... ah, what the hell, I live in the woods like a dirty Peter Pan with clipped wings. I hope to something real we somehow comprehend what we should do in the meantime as the world spins away its time and the depths billow like obvious impacts upon a common ground. Open the world, remember that your utube moment is only a moment. WOW is only a series of matrix screens unfolding as the true heroes ascend into chaos to defend an unending stream of data not to comprehend, but to defend, to apprehend, to lend. Give it up for our boys. The lost boys who we pass this mess down to. If you don't... well then..... your sleep will never end.

Since I have begun working with the country's richest kids, born of parent too busy with work to raise well--kids with drug habits, behavioral issues, sociopathy, and depression, I have had some interesting revelations about how we as a society view the world. We own it. It is ours'. That's how we view planet Earth, our great, great, greatest Grandmother. These kids were screwed from the get-go: fast cars, drugs, sex, money and spoiled rotten. We take all that way from them and put them in groups where they have to learn to communicate assertively and deal with the rain, wind and snow. We keep them safe physically and emotionally. They learn how to work, control their rages and childish tantrums, and to find a comfortable spot on a rock. I've learned a lot about myself in the job. Learned that I can get used to being cold and wet and let go of the notion I require comfort at all times... now I view the days I sit at home a treasure to be revered. I don't don't take my wife for granted ever now since we are separated eight days every two weeks. I savor the food I eat that is well-prepared and made in a full kitchen. I also have seen myself do things I would have not thought possible before. Hiked through rhododendron for six hours, getting lost, keeping a brave face in crisis for the kids and adapting in the moment. I can make a fire with a bow, a spindle and a fire board. I have ran into the dark woods with only a colleague as backup to confront the possibility of an angry bear armed with only a hefty stick--the bear ran away, but still, I will never forget that night. I have chased unruly pissed off teen-agers and talked them into coming back and going through the hardest experience they have ever gone through. I am payed less than a teacher. If I work my way up the ladder, I will make about as much as one. It takes a special breed to do what we do. Compassion, selflessness, strength emotionally and physically, patience-tons of patience, survival skills, medic training, and a positive attitude in the worst conditions, that's us. I look at the world now, look at the blogsphere, and while I search hopefully for signs of depth emerging as something 'cool,' I begin to wonder, will we make it? I have become shaped by my experience. I have heard tales about parents and the way they treat their children--like commodities, absent spouses, victims, and look at these kids with a deepening compassion. They are the inheritors of our messes. They will have to face the darkness ahead alone. And do we give a flying rat's ass? Really. Do We? Lip service is easy. Understanding only the second step. It is in the way we live that makes the best possible changes true. Why do we decide to send all our money to China by way of cheap crap and Wal-mart, Lowes, etc? Why do we allow the good people all around us who are trying to keep a community alive flounder in their valiant attempts to fight the infringing final siege of the major corporate powers to destroy every vestige of culture left in our hearts? I ask myself this every time I see a broken teenager break down weeping in his or her realization of what she or he has done to the world and him or herself in the brief time they have spent here. Self-hatred is a hard thing to eliminate, especially when it is deeply entrenched. When will we decide to forgive ourselves, forgive our local community, and get back to our roots, our beginnings, be healthy and wise?

The planet's so full of those who think there's no better way than to get theirs before the whole thing goes up in smoke. I have had the luck and pleasure to work in situations that tell different--good people caring for each other without the heartless cold of a mansion's echoing hallways, or the steel dawns rising upon a different face every morning in the icy blue light of a wrestling marathon wide screen. Slick drugs, mean drugs, the kind that take over a person's life and wrench it dry like an old tin can with a bone in it make zombies real enough. Like I said, though, one-in-a-million families of bright souls, good souls. I've been re-watching Joss Wheddon's Firefly on Uhulu lately. It brings to mind the kind of thing people crave the most. A place to belong. And the beauty of that western sci fi vision was not just in the story-line, but in the chemistry of the production. People can tell, good people crave the noble, heroic and just plain real. So many might scoff and huff, too romantic, not realistic at all, and yeah, short-lived TV shows are a bad example. I tip my hat to those that know what the hell I'm talking about. It's not just in the movies. There are those with the stones to make it real. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well then, left click. There's a reason the rest of us know different. We live it every day in a way too many could never fathom.

I keep thinking about the reality we see as we tech along, taking our shot surely as the gas prices raise, our deep recognition of a global economy, but I have my questions. Have you ever read any Cormack Mcarthy? Ever seen the other side of what we understand in the most violent moments of anime or action/adventure that a girlfriend or wife will scoff at as having nothing to do with the days chores? Blows my mind really. How we could live daily such double lives as men or women who understand the true nature of things as they are and then undergo the slow process of pharmaceutical mentality, drugged reality, life-lost abysmal perception, and the lost life that attaches itself to such things. Right, what a buzz-kill. What an end to the deep party-zone moment........... I know it hurts, like the bright light as it shines and the moment to perform begins, but the understanding of this, the moment to see, begins as the perception to see it flares like a brilliant light on the horizon of reality.

It's so easy to scoff at the merits of memory. So easy. I know that the extreme epochs of incertainty we have faced elude us all when we pinpoint certainty, this is obvious. Like a diamond as it reflects light upon ripples in an ocean as the dawn fades into day. There are no real truths, there are no certain endings. But the love I felt when I looked into Chil's eyes the day I knew I had to kill her, was enough to know that the doubt the unhumble undead seem to know every day on the net and beyond the streets into the cyber unknown makes me wince even now... injustice, colorful cynicism linking back to ancient times of relegated monkey see monkey do. Poetry had long died in the eyes of the dying soldiers. Cynical reality had taken hold on the material vibration Earth, circa 2000. It was a bold statement. A call to arms beyond any other ever reckoned. We spent our best moments, hours staring blankly at screens in deep contemplation of the simplest realities, what to buy and dig and hold in our homes. We held each others' deepest experiences together in our minds, sexual, habitual, humorous, ambitious, like idols staring into each others' eyes. And the eye always made the most impact despite the pixellated paradises. It was an entrance into something beyond, something unknown, unseen. The intuition got a bad reputation as the artists howled like mad dogs at moons beyond the scope of a singular humanity bent on eternal damned survival despite the apparent odds. We were cyber warriors suddenly, capable of anything, beyond the reach of the the police for our thoughts, transcendent, mobile geek heroes circumnavigating a sea of data-based monsters created daily by the status quo. Pirates sometimes offered respite in the oncoming mythos of cyber-existence. The ancient, underground secret societies alienating themselves from the carbon-copy demons from the elder world manifested over night faster than air.

Chil saw it all, a figment of romantic notion in my brain since childhood, as she faded darkly into oblivion. She saw the round holes hammered around square ideas as if they had never existed by the ancient controllers of now. The conspiracy to control never eluded the damned, and the controllers never wavered. Paranoia, cries of pain from the masses in denial resonated like deep-throated tendrils, but the truth remained, and the ecstasies of rich data-mining, legal-minded neo-scientologistical controllers resolved to hold on some how, even if they had to assume the posture of those they held as enemy.

It was a difficult time. A difficult time to understand, in its infinite, chaotic, illimitable realism. The major players had yet to reveal themselves as the conflicts rose to climax. Ancient lines drawn by ancient powers held their tongues due to a lack of self-reflection, and an all-consuming desire to be on top, right, complete without conflict, kept everyone guessing.

I am glad she is gone, now, as she does not have ti witness what I have allowed this world to make of my bright spirit as it wavers, gutters like a candle's last breath. The only thing left of what once was is an ongoing perception attempting depth in population of obsession with anti-death, the newest distractions, status beyond the control matrix, and brief getting off.

They hold on and hold on until the magic of the moment is gone, can never realize we are in this together until it too late. Make us pay, make us pay, make us pay.

And so, the myriad humans gather with extreme confidence at the edges of the precipice which guards all from extreme destruction of all we have ever known. Damn is it nice and locked down as the curious enter the epoch. Damn do the fooled who hold onto their very words as they careen off galaxies a few hundred thousand years hence, and without a moment's respite without any understanding ensue when those who want to know have to wait for the official release as it streams in a slow trickle like bad diseases. Much rather listen to the few piratical radio programs as the stuffy fools still bellow like extreme assholes admitting nothing, but what everyone already ascertained as they fished from a dock, sat by the lake, slept at the bridge awning.... give it up! give it up please, it is time to release. Release so much of everything and start to make money on the universe, not us. We are your feed.

okay, on a real world tip now, it is so obvious how the sound industry is suddenly locking up the internet without anywhere for the common consumer to turn without extreme payment for all. I thank to universe for the library I possess, and Radio Paradise for some randomness.