A Little Fawn Sleeps

What can you see outta your eyeballs right now? Are you in bed, on a bus, in a car, in class, at home, on a starship, in a Particle Fixer 3000 swooshing your molecules on the red-eye home to Mars?

Two weeks on the dead Earth looking for survivors. We found one. One little fawn, still red pelted, quivering in the burnt bush. How the hell it survived the fire I dunno but when it saw me it leaped right up into my arms and nuzzled its muzzle into my chest and pushed its nose under my armpit. I could feel its heart beating like two-forty and the poor thing shook like a leaf.

That's all we found this time. So I rest my head against the bulwark and watch the neutrinos pass through me. Down below in the hold, sedated and hooked up to an IV, the little fawn sleeps.

The Marriage Between Science and God

The universe began 14 billion years ago in an event called the Big Bang. Everything in existence went from smaller than an electron to 93 billion light-years in less than a picosecond.

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. It took six days. On the seventh, He rested. At first, there was only the void. Darkness moved across the face of the water. God created the Earth and many plants and crawling things. He shaped man and woman from clay and breathed life into their nostrils.

Different but the same? It's not like I really know what a billion light-years means or universe or picosecond. I nod and say sure, yeah, that makes sense. But in my heart of hearts, I'm taking it on faith.

My society tells me a billion makes sense so I say okay. I believe whatever scientists tell me. I believe what Science tells me. We're walking a very fine line here, friend. How about we just say God and Science got married?

We were all there. It was a huge celebration, even bigger than Bilbo's one hundred and eleventh birthday. All the animals came two by two, and every human on Earth was there too. We all filed across the land, up the mountain and down into a bowl, a natural amphitheater where, in front of a trillion pairs of eyes, feelers, and other various forms of sensors, God and Science were betrothed by Old Man Snake.

The sun shone. Birds sang. The mountain meadow smelled of pine and fresh flowers. A babbling brook laughed on the mountainside and, for an instant, everyone felt it – a perfect union in the air.

Altogether we walked that razor's edge up to the top of the mountain where, riding a zephyr high over the rainbow, the two young lovers retired to the matrimonial bed. Then the party really kicked off. The babbling brook became champagne and a nearby glacier brought glasses. The entire human race and all of the animals got high in the moonlight. We danced, laughed, sang, and cried. Great bonds were forged out of steel.

The next day at sun-up, everything was asleep. Even the brook, happiest of all, was snoring gently, a party hat pulled low over her eyes. Oh, it was wonderful when the two became one. Since then, life's been a dream.

Flood

Let's wander off course for a while where we're not supposed to. Let's go over to the dark side, the one they don't want you to know exists. Take part with me, friend, in a revolution of love. Fuck simple reforms. We need chaos and rifts, upheavals, surges and waves, waves of love pouring down the streets, sweeping people offa their feet, bringing people together, everyone simply together.

We're living in unprecedented times, my friend. I mean who the fuck isn't? Isn't every life unique and brand spanking new? Or am I a rerun – has my movie been played a million times? No, but seriously, shit's fuckin fucked like we've never seen it in literally fifty or sixty years. But remember the 90s? Those halcyon days of simplicity and peace? Calm serenity lapped on the beaches of the millennium's childhood. For a little white kid growing up in Canada, the whole world seemed like a sweet glass of milk.

Well, my friend, the milk curdled, the smell soured; it tasted like sick in your mouth. The world changed one September day in 2001. Since then things have gotten a lot darker, especially in the last four, five years.

Then with this recent pandemonium, we've seen one of the greatest opportunities for love in a long time. We have so much love, brothers and sisters, and we gotta give it. Don't hold back love, not when it's needed. Just look outside. We need love more than ever.

With darkness comes light, with hatred, love. Which will you bring to the world?

The Martian Code of Ethics

What a fucked up few months we've had. Our first pandemic. That wasn't too bad, some people are thinking. Oh, you just wait, friend. Shit ain't even started.

Flash forward a few years and there's smoke on every horizon. The air's acrid and putrid. The flies just won't go away. Crops burn. Rivers no longer exist. The oceans are salt flats. Humans either live at the poles, underground or on Mars.

Those who could afford it escaped to the red planet in 2021. After the western United States exploded, taking Canada and most of the Pacific with it, shit went south. It was kinda fun for a while. Watching it on the news was exciting. But then things got exciting in the streets so we stopped watching TV and began watching our backs.

Many people disappeared one night. We woke up and half the planet was gone. Empty beds. Quiet neighbourhoods. Empty launchpads where the rockets once stood. At first we assumed they'd come get us, or at least send a message.

We wouldn't have ever known if it wasn't for the cast-offs, rejects, outcasts, and condemned banished back to Earth for transgressing one of the rules of the Martian Code of Ethics.

It read very much like the American Declaration of Independence with a bit of the Tao and a sprinkling of Battlestar Galactica. The outcasts spoke of cities of gold and rivers of milk and honey. People communicate telepathically and hate has been expunged once and for all.

For us heathens, scorched earth remains. Like beasts we scratch on our bellies in the dirt, eating roots and roaches and drinking toxic slime. We die early. Thirty-five is old and wise. We've forgotten all we once knew. I'm writing this using a stick and some mud.

I myself have been banished. The outcasts cast me out. I live at the bottom of a burned-out elevator shaft in an apartment complex in what used to be the capital city all bustling and noisy with laughter. I hope life is different for you.

Love Love Love

I'ma judge no one. I have no standards. It's not up to me to determine someone's worth or unworth. I can pass no sentence. For I, my friend, am an hypocrite. I think everyone should be better and yet I fail every day. I am neither the best nor the worst human being on the planet. I am somewhere slap bang in the middle.

I'ma let go of titles, plaques, pieces of paper, and medals. All that matters is writing something better than yesterday. So what is the final solution? Well, we'll see. When the chips are down and the blood's been spilled, when the aggressor's holding a knife to your neck, when there's blood all over your linoleum floor, then we'll know what really went down. Until then, my friend, it's only conjecture. It's a hell of a gamble we make. Make, take, rake over the coals and see if there's not actually something very special inside.

Look deep into the fire. What can you see? There's something worth investigating. I can guarantee that. If you feel what I feel deep in your soul, then we should probably get the fuck outta here. This is no place for people like us. So come on! Let's get fuckin outta here. I'm gonna write platitudes all fuckin day! Platitudinous rex. Know what I'm sayin?

Stare off into the middle distance and listen to my words. Listen to the sound of my voice. I'll let you know when it's time to come out of your trance. Telling people some epic fuckin stories around a fire in a teepee with the wind howling out there but it's warm and cosy in here. There's water, wine and smoke. Whatever you want. Then I play the drum and sing a song then begin the story of the wandering bull. I've got a setlist and I'm taking you through a prescriptive journey, one that takes you to the edge then dumps you over it, filling your heart with fear and pity then releasing the floodgates for some fuckin cathartic waves to pass through. It's one of the most beautiful feelings in the world – catharsis. And no one really talks about it. Do you know what it is? Do I? I should study it more deeply.

What do you think about the end of the world? Will you be there when the planets collide? Fuck no. I'ma be long dead and buried. I'll have returned to the eternal source. All will be well with the cosmos. Nothing lasts forever. Even forever is a blink of the eye. Fear not the reaper. He's an old friend, come to pick you up for an epic car ride, a road trip to the very center of your soul. Would you recognize your soul if you saw it in the street or beside the toothpaste in aisle twenty-five? Where does your dream self go when the lights come on and you open your eyes and the alarm blares out a brand new day? It shuffles off its perch, off the coil, and into the shadows of our mind, our mind's eye, our sub or unconscious, the deepest, darkest part of our being, the part we don't share with strangers, we don't even know it ourselves, shit gets crazy down there, all wild, sweaty, and steamy. Salads are being tossed, heads are being given, moans, groans, and sobs sound from the creases and hollows. Wet sounds. Pet sounds. Wet sounds. How you like them apples? Forbidden fruit – apples and cherries crunching and popping. Step up, step in for your chance to win. Everyone's equal here, my perverted friend. I don't care about your healthy aspects. I wanna see where you're sick. Show me the darkness and I'll show you mine. Together, in the darkness, two snakes entwined.

The Creative Method

Stories can help show us how we should live. That's why we need em. The scientific method tells us what life is. The creative method tells us how it could be. Think of something you know to be true. Pick a fact out of the world then think about how it could be different in one simple way.

Zebras have black and white stripes, for example. What if they were purple and yellow? That, my friend, is called being creative. Think about something. Change it. Now think about how it would be.

What would the world be like if aliens took over? What would it be like to be the first humans on Earth? What would it be like if a New York heiress fell in love with a bank robber from New Orleans?

What if? What would life be like if..? What would happen if...? The cool thing about the creative method is that after running the simulation, you can bring back what you found – the lessons, mistakes, new understandings – and integrate them into your life in the Real World.

Just as science helps us understand the basic rules and make up of our beautiful universe, creativity helps us understand the basic rules and make up of our beautiful souls.

Neither can replace the other. Each benefits and enhances the other. They are dualities, brothers, two sides of the same page. The more creative our scientists are, the better. The more scientific our creatives are, the better. Together, we'll figure it out.

A Beginner's Guide to Telling the Truth

I had a crazy vivid dream. I kept waking up and going back into the dream. I was in a cabin in the woods, a kind of back-country hostel, and all my friends were there, friends from now as well as in the past.

There were threats of all kinds, from having no room so I'd have to sleep with a stranger, to bears attacking, to some kind of interpersonal beef where I was in trouble with all my acquaintances. They were all running around anxiously now.

During the chaos, I found myself drafting a plan to the most perfect piece of writing ever penned by a human. It made sense of the whole world, now and forever. I understood the story at a macro and micro level.

I drew up a draft so perfect that even my body knew heavy shit was going down; it kept waking me up to remember it. And then in the rainy Sunday morning light, all that was left was one sentence, the phrase, a title.