Welsh knows.

A light is not a beginning, and the darkness is never an end.

An odd light bent down on John’s desk that morning. He had been sleeping again, at his desk. The pens that usually lay in perfect order to his right had been knocked askew by his elbow as it bent under his head, his hands forming a small pillow to suit his slumber. John awoke suddenly, his head buzzing, as if stung by one of the yellow jackets that made nests in the earth of his back yard. He jolted, reached for his left temple and gave an odd yawn mixed with a burst of discomfort. The pages before him, where his head had been moments before, were scrawled with notes and diagrams dotted with loosely written symbols, much like the quantum theory equations he studied daily. John had been working from a dream he'd had. He had dreamed that the world, earth, was not quite what it seemed; in fact he had dreamed that this big bang, the creator of all things, the father of all energy, was not the first of its kind after all. The concept had come to him just after, in his dream, he had spoken to the most magnificent representation of the female form and had discussed in length the difference between male and female, to which the female representative had so eloquently made her case for the latter. In the dream, they both were seated atop a large precipice that laid view to a dark ocean textured with small whirlpool shapes of which she explained to be galaxies. She spoke of the natural existence of expansion and retraction, or ebb and flow to put it simply. The ideas in Johns head, in his dream, were running wild as she spoke further elaborating on the idea of the beginning and end, and the connection between the moments where recession and expansion are so close, ultimately the zero factor. This is where Johns mind stopped and he saw, in his dream, the ocean full of whirlpool galaxies evaporate while another pool appeared in its place playing host to galaxy shapes he, as a physicist, had never seen before.  “This is the universe of the first from the last. A countless amount of time before this moment and waking we are in now.” She spoke with a golden voice matching her eyes and hair. “There have been many since this formation, but this,” she gazed out into the ocean reaching with her hands to showcase the colors and beauty before them both, “this is the beginning of creation, and from here has all came and been repeated and varied.” Her hands broke color as they slid through the landscape causing the ground beneath them to evaporate and a feeling of weightlessness to take John over. He gazed outward into the beginning and was overcome with a combination of fear and bliss, he knew that he must study this new enlightenment, and share this new gift that lay before him. There was no theory that could count this thought, this feeling, and there was no choice for him; he must work, he must think, and he must understand the chance he had been given. “So our universe, ever expanding, billions and billions of years old, is not the beginning of everything?” he heard himself speak, a little too loud to still be dreaming. Then as the darkness lightened and his body once again sensed weight and gravity, his eyelids began opening, and he heard a the faintest hint of a whisper. “The beginning is now, and the end has been.”

Settlementation

     Glorious actions have taken place in this city for many years. The culture of Starbuck's and Bud Light and robot fast food delivery systems on each and every Friday - Sunday morning to night are paramount to the joy of living in this modern age. Now, it has saturated our fat glands and made us into these consumer blobs that we are, but after a few hundred years of awesome settled existence we are all pretty cool with it. I wear a suit of denim and leather and fit in just like everyone else. We are cattle and sheep and mice and men, lumped in, but not humans. The larger economy class, as its called, is dictated by the media driven money machines called corporations and the politicians are all fed through tubes with faux nipples attached that excrete watered down justice, blended human bone meal and shredded green paper. I've heard that the politicians are bred with foxes and snakes to make them more capable to recognize exploitable opportunities and squeeze the life out of them for the betterment of me and my fellow Blobs. These days my denim tuxedo fits a bit too tight, so I'll probably have to have a new one shipped in from the internet, wherever that is. Now, I've got to make sure to order the best color and style fitting for whatever goddamned consumer season we are in, I forget.  I forget a lot of things, but really it's okay because its all explained on the television via those pink plastic farces throwing hand gestures and reading from their prompting screens. It makes most people comfortable knowing that there are folks up top, in the tall back chairs at the big tables, making all these decisions for us and making damn sure that it's what we "want" based on our metadata and its golden mean.

     You want to hear something strange? I saw a man walking yesterday and it freaked me out. I said, "Hey man, why are you walking?" I was gliding aside him on my single wheel street feet machine. He looked at me and grinned real big and pointed to his shirt. It was a really old shirt, like from the two thousands or something, and it had a weird symbol on it. It looked like someone had taken a circle and jammed a cross in it and then broken the two horizontal parts of the cross and they had just kind of fallen due to gravity. It really confused me. I had to stop my street feet walk machine and just watch as the man literally walked away from me using no energy except the stuff in his own body. I was freaking out, and worst of all I was sweating because I had ran out of coolant in my street feet walk machine because, in my mesmerized state, I had followed this Blob right outside of my four blocks and would have kept going had it not been for my house beacon activating and calling me home. I was freaked out for sure. 

     The next day I slid limply out of bed onto my changing table and let the hooks and harnesses take my clothes off and wipe my bottom and thrust paste in my mouth and under my arms to make sure I did not smell badly outside or inside. I then allowed myself to go limp again while the other hooks and tubes and air jets cooled me off as my denim and leather was slid on over my exposed skin. My skin is kind of pink and grey and perfect for my daily activities as a writer for the Do Nothing Daily, a community paper that everyone has stored into their memory foam each morning. So here I was sitting in my chair gliding to my kitchen to have some McDonalds breakfast delivery and think about how I would rewrite what the news had told me the day before so that everyone who knows what I write will feel okay. The McDonald's was perfect as always, the egg was very squishy and had a great sheen to it, the biscuit was almost hard with butter paint, and the browned hashed potato was soaking wet with grease. I really did love McDonald's, especially the 16 oz. Coke I got each morning, which was always refreshing after the cleaning paste taste had gone away. 

     So, as I sat there eating my breakfast delivery and watching the pink plastic news readers I began thinking of my own jay oh bee and how I was going to explain the man I'd seen walking. Come to think about it, his big bouncing body and his white ( I think it's called ) sweat band, were in my mind all the while I slept. I felt weird and confused again and wondered how I was going to tell the Do Nothing Daily my encounter. The dilemma was really starting to take away from the joy of a good wet hashed potato, but suddenly I had it and I clicked on my talk-typer and began discussing.

                                

                                My fellow Blobbers, today I saw something

                                rather unusual and would like to offer you 

                                the time to put this transmition in your trash

                                folder as it may cause unsettelment in some. 

                                Yesterday morning I was taking a walk in my
                                street feet walk machine with it's one wheel 

                                and came across what, oddly, seemed to me

                                 to be a fellow Blob walking with his own two

                                 feet. As many of you know, this is a hazardous

                                 and sometimes deadly activity, however this

                                 particular individual seemed to enjoy this form

                                 of self propulsion and even smiled at me when

                                 I asked him what, in fact, he was doing. 

                                 The strangest part of this encounter was the

                                 attire of this stranger. He was wearing traditional

                                 denim leg coverings, and the standard leather

                                 ankle and foot garmetts, but had shed his upper

                                 body cover in lieu of a century old cover that was,

                                 memory serving, made of the now extinct Coxton

                                 plant, I believe that is it's name. The garment

                                 appeared to be light weight, however was highly 

                                 saturated with his own sweat, which we all know

                                 leads to the body becoming saturated and starting

                                 to smell. So, please fellow Blob's please be on the

                                 watch for any signs that one of our kind has gone

                                 rogue. He can be identified by his coxton clothing                                  

                                 and the odd symbol of the broken cross. 

                                 As always, this has been Brian Blender a proud 

                                 member of this four block community, from 

                                 floor number 1 on the ground to floor number 

                                 12,325 in the sky, and all the folks in the stars. 

                                   Good morning to all from Floor 1. 

                                   -Brian Blender

Well, I've let my people know that there is a traitor walking our blocks and, not only wreaking havoc in our society, but actually reeking with all that sloppy, sticky, coxton upper cover. Thank Green Paper I am in the position to tell someone from my first floor home. Who knows what could happen if people actually started following that rogue Blob. No worries though, they have been warned and I told them. Ahhhh, that feels better.

A thought I had recently: 

Feeling good about doing good for others is a great thing.

     If I can just strive to do these things I think and feel good about then most likely everything will be okay. However, doing good and enjoying it fully, and all the time, is much harder than one would think. It takes a lot of willpower to continue on in a positive, for-the-love-of, manner and not allow it to tug on the strings of your abilities, or capacity for good work. It is a good idea to try and not stop yourself from caring for others. I believe, however, that this quest for the empowerment of the good in, and for, all is something we should, as a collective, strive towards, while remembering that our ego's are not in complete control of ourselves, and we, the collective, are not entirely our ego's as they are a part of a set level of consciousness. The ego simply resides along side the Id, in tune with the super-ego, that is the definition of I, we, all. So go forth and do in the name of the greater good, and try as best you can, to feel good about it.



-WJ