For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.
–1 Cor 13:12, KJV

Sometime perhaps I will dutifully study the thirteenth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, trying to figure out what that could possibly mean. For now it lies there on the page as a completely inscrutable koan, except for the fact that in the moment, in the beginning, it means … this.

It should be my windshield glass seen through darkly, my car; it isn’t.

It ought to be US 60 east of Reserve, New Mexico, but instead it is a road in a place now understood properly to be called the Luhansk People’s Republic, so very recently invaded or liberated or however the fuck you personally choose to think of it–why really should I care which word you choose?

Something like a week back I told you about the personal individual sanctioning, by his own government, of a British journalist named Graham Phillips. Without even a pretense of due process, that government took his house and whatever other assets of his they could get their venomously evil hands on because, they said, he was guilty of being a propagandist ‘video blogger’.

In my post I said that I hoped we’d hear from Graham himself soon on the matter. In reality his response was almost immediate. But I didn’t see it until tonight.

The windshield glass in the picture is his. The image is a still capture from his response video. His response video just blew me away and right now it’s making me question everything about the life I live myself.

I listened in wonder tinged with pitiful envy.

In my own life I always had some vague notion of being The Writer, even specifically a journalist some of the time.

Underneath the veneer of that lofty aim though, what I really wanted to be was finally secure and comfortable enough to write or drive around the back roads or get laid or whatever I felt like doing in the moment.

I chose the course of my life in order to get to that real goal with as little brain damage as possible. Meaning: as little contact with the authority of petty tyrants as possible; as little conformity to the rules as I could get away with; as minimally few hours of wasting my life in the Employ of anyone or any system as I could humanly manage.

Finding the path involved a looping series of false starts and partial successes.

Then, in my forties, I found a place and I stopped roaming around trying and trying again. I found a nothing town with a tiny college. I started there as a literal Webmaster. It morphed into some half-ass kind of distance learning coordinator. Finally I became faculty. A professor even driving out to the Rez once a week to teach, of all apparently noble things–having and holding the security and the comfort at the heart of my desires, and getting my hooks into it without doing any real harm to my self or my world.

It lasted that way for ten years, and I stacked up little piles of comfort and security in the form of a modest new car, an equity-building home purchase, a Roth IRA, a pension plan. There was nothing at all noble about it. There was no Art. There was no Activism. There was only my head just above the surging necessities of the working class life I’d always led, and the promising notion that someday I would never again have to go back to those necessary evils again. If only I could just keep compromising with my society a little longer. Then no more boss man looking over my shoulder ever. Then I’d be free. Then I’d be happy.

It all came down in a hammer blow from nowhere.

The petty tyrants schemed a vicious lying scheme and dumped me in the gutter on the drop of a dime.

It very nearly killed me dead. Not from the impact of the curbstone on my head, but from what went on inside it; how I reacted.

In a controlled panic, I applied for another seemingly identical job, at another seemingly identical college, still teaching, still within the state retirement system, and I got it, which seemed like salvation.

It wasn’t salvation at all and I have no one to blame for that but myself in the end.

In my heart and in my gut, when I first came to the nothing town with the tiny college, I already knew that it was the last best place for me to try to compromise myself with my society, to try to make a deal for the comfortable security my dingy battered craven soul ached for so desperately.

A few years after I got to it, they put surveillance cameras up on the three traffic lights in the nothing town, and it was a portentous omen. The world was shrinking and the killer virus of modernity and bureaucratic fascism had even reached out to here. The town shifted to accommodate the virus and the tiny college foolishly changed to welcome it too–what they had as a frontier legacy was thrown like pearls before swine, and the boss pigs swallowed every pearl like so much dirty corn, turning themselves into grunting robots to please their betters down in Maricopa.

I didn’t want to believe it. I shaded my eyes with my hand against it, and then modern reality rushed in and blindsided me and it was my own damn fault.

At the new identical college, the virus was at least a dozen years more evolved than it had been in the nothing town. A year later, unable to live with it, I applied at a third college because it was isolated up at a nice high elevation, and I desperately hoped that would mean that the pace of the virus was slower there too. But if anything, it was worse. At this third place, this last place, I made it two years, and they were the worst years of my life. My health tanked brutally, and my mental health especially. I let that all happen, for the worst reasons, and I suffered for it.

At the very end came the other virus, the one called Covid Nineteen, and in some twisted way it was a blessing for me, thirty human months ago or so. For a little while, the noisy modern world shut down. For a little while, unemployment and other checks trickled in to float me past the very worst of the madness. I moved back to the nothing town and the equity house, the ‘investment’ turning itself into a real temporary salvation.

Last year, halfway between that moving-back time and tonight, I cashed in the last big leftover asset and that’s what’s been floating me ever since. I paid off every bill but the mortgage. I bought a small piece of raw land in the new next best place, my dream place. I broke my last hard tie with the System I always hated and hate even more now. I bought a twenty year old pickup truck to park next to the only new car, which by now was ten years old. I made some plans and they’re still simmering on the back burner in separate little expensive pots. The important part is setting up a replacement salvation house on the small piece of raw land in the dream town, and selling off this old one in the nothing town. God knows if I’ll ever make it, but if I do I’ll theoretically be free at last, to write and screw and drive around without worrying what anyone thinks about any of it.

The point of this whole digressive tale is what happened when I watched the Graham Phillips response video.

For six minutes I gazed at and listened to someone provably better than I’ve ever been in my life.

I don’t know what advantages he grew up with, if any. I don’t know what was handed to him and what he worked for, starting out.

I do know that as I watched, I realized, in a way I never have before, just how broken and afraid I’ve been for so long, underneath my tall strong pose.

Advantaged or not, he did it right. He did what I should have done instead of crawling around ineptly trying to compromise myself for security and comfort. He lived out loud. He joined a side. He wrote and he drove and he let comfort and security take care of themselves.

When they inevitably came after him, “they” were not a tragic collection of bog-stupid cow-faced Deans and amoral Chairs, but the evil cream of his own national government. He calls out the woman who will be their next Prime Minister by name, as the soul with a personal interest in persecuting him illegally.

When they came after him, he didn’t break his own mind over it, folding in on himself like a paper condominium. He wasn’t broken or weak. He didn’t spit uselessly in their faces and run for the hills.

Instead, he … well, watch the goddamned video. Stare at his face and out through that glass for six minutes.

Afterward, you can maybe go check out his sniffily-written little Wikipedia page, and you can find plenty of reasons to question his tactics, or even hate him for the things he believes or the things he’s done.

***

But–hear me–I’m not talking about how politically or morally pure this one man is. I’m not setting up a false idol, or trying to convince you one way or the other about anything at all, personal or political.

I’m telling you a quiet story about what this news story did to me just now.

I’m saying out loud to you: Right or wrong, he’s lived life bravely and continues to … while I have lived in so many ways, even if there were good sympathetic understandable reasons for it–like a coward.

I have sequestered myself every way I could, and reveled in tasting the Proustian Madeleine of horned toads and hoppy frogs.

That wasn’t wrong of me in any ultimate sense: I’m sure I had my reasons, blah blah blah.

But my deficiency of bravery hasn’t resulted in my happiness, either.

Would bravely grabbing life’s bull by the horns make me happy?

Nobody knows.

***

I’ve been my mother, stumbling through life so dependent on the kindness of the intimate strangers, and finding the next one and the next, always doing whatever I do with the pure intention of never falling back into the helplessness of poverty, no matter how much it costs or who might end up paying the bill or blood price for it.

I’ve been my head-broke father, paranoid schiz about every damn thing, and always taking the easiest, cheapest path to a false security and a comfortless comfort, never loving anyone as much as he loved himself, never afraid to punch a bad guy in the mouth, but always skittish about facing the less pleasant realities of my self. I stuff myself with organic rice instead of candy bars, and I never selfishly bailed on a child of my own, but … I’ve failed in being the man I really wanted to be, just the same.

At least so far.

The one thing I do have going for me is what my few scattered admirers have called my integrity. I don’t believe I have much more actual integrity than the next fool, by the dictionary definition of the word. I’m not above weakness. I’m not all that sound of body or mind. I see very little evidence of integration, in my history. I’ve segregated instead; I compartmentalized.

I’ve even lied to myself at times, while dancing with perfect stark honesty through a dozen wrecked relationships.

I just never … settled and died inside, the way most people do at thirty or forty or fifty or sixty.

I never quite gave up completely on myself, even after I gave up on my world and my country and even my species.

I have learned to accept that there are a precious few people in this world who never quite gave up on me either, and that I need them for that despite never wanting to need anyone for anything.

I have steadfastly refused to believe that my failures could ever be permanent or defining, to the point of crippling me for life.

In moments like those six terrible minutes of watching Graham be a fundamentally better person, a braver person, a happier person, than I am, I never gave in to the lie of Game Over.

I’ve learned to accept that it will be over someday, when they shovel dirt in my face, and that every day that goes by I get infinitely closer to that mortal fact.

I don’t have a lot of time left. I’m not going to waste it by trying to make things right.

They’re as right as they’ll ever be out there, and that’s not very. History says things will only get worse.

Inside my own heart, head, soul, though … there is a road winding through the mountains on two lane blacktop. I can see it through the glass, darkly, when I close my eyes and breathe.

The road calls to me, whispering to take its curves at a speed right up against the limits of the safe and sane, the secure and the comfortable. Mullein plant, datura leaf, coyote sprinting to the barbed wire on the other side, ripping his furry back but avoiding the hissing wheels of splattering time, for one more unholy day.