PJarrett

I've been around for a while now.  I've lived through a lot of history, for better or worse.  I'd like to think I know who I am, even though my self-identification is obviously flawed.

More and more I think I am nothing more than a listing of places I've been.  A bibliography of books I've read.  
Years ago, in my youth, I was in Nashville, Tennessee.  That seemed to be the sum of my existence.  I was a young man living on the streets of that gritty, ugly and sublime town.  Nobody who hasn't lived in Nashville can understand what that means.  I suppose, on some level, we all have our Nashvilles.  Truth is, I don't care about anyone else.  

Nashville was my Mother...far more than the biological womb from which I first emerged.  There are many places in the world, many towns...Hemingway in Paris comes to mind.  But I doubt any of you can understand the connection...between myself, and a town and a particular moment in history when everything came together to mold the rest of my life.

When you leave your family, when you leave your home...the first city...be it LA or New York or Paris or Berlin or London...the first city where you come into your own as an artist, as a writer...the place is special, as special as the first girl you ever lay with.  The town becomes a part of you, of who you are on some visceral, deeply psychological manner.  

Nashville was the light that drew me out of the darkness of the West Virginia hollers where I grew up.  Nashville was the freedom outside the cage of those dark, dangerous and disgusting hollers.  So many people wax sentimental and sticky for where they grew up.

Me, I still have nightmares of the holler in Boone County, West Virginia where I grew up.  The darkness, the clinging, cloying heat of the coal black summer nights and the freezing, blistering cold of the winter days in those hollers still haunts my dreams and my nightmares.

Nightmares of the house...my uncle's house...up Snodgrass Holler in Boone County, West Virginia.  Where the light switches never work...where the darkness is more than visible but is a presence all its own.  

Ignorance.  Of course.  It would be easy to ascribe that darkness, those futile light switches...to a manifestation of the ignorance I struggle against...I still struggle agains... even 63 years later.

But there's more to that darkness.

There is the hot breath on the back of my neck from my brother as he sodomized me.  There is the distant and uncaring aspect of my father who only spoke to me on two occasions...taking me down to the church where he preached as if to emphasize that what he was saying wasn't just coming from him but from the Lord himself...to lecture me about the evils of masturbation...evils that it would take me years and countless hours of contemplation to understand weren't evil at all...but were rather the normal activity of a boy my age who happened to be unfortunate to have been raised in a Christian minister's household.  Of my mother who ignored me as I grew up...except to take me aside and tell me how my father had raped her 7 times on her wedding night when I was barely 11 years old.  How was I supposed to handle this?  This abuse, this violation...from my brother and my father and my brother?

I fought back.  Even  in my earliest years I fought back.  I began writing short stories and novels when I was 12...spreading my pages on the dining room table and banging away at a portable, manual typewriter I had asked for for my eleventh birthday.  Nobody paid any attention, that's the cruellest thing.  I wrote and I wrote and my parents ignored me.

Still, to this day, I know of no one who has read my work.  Strangers, perhaps.  But no one in my family or friends...not even my wife who says that my poetry scares her...even the love poems I wrote her when I was wooing her.

I come out here on DA and I throw pieces of myself out into the water like a fisherman chumming the water to draw in the big fish.  Some people say nice things.  Nice.  

Nice means they just didn't understand at all what I am writing about.  

Nice means they somehow missed the anger that fuels my poetry, my short stories, my essays.

I am not a nice man.

I am not a good man.

I am angry and full of rage.

I am a lonely man.

I am...

I've never written a journal entry the entire time I've been out here on DA.  I don't care of journals.  At best, they are self-indulgent and, at worst, you're just pissing away good stuff that would be better suited for an essay or poem.

Yeah, I'm vain, you're not.  The illusion of humility is the height of vanity.

OK, I've been watching Hemlock Grove on Netflix.  I love it.  Usually, when I like something....House or the first season of Lost...once everyone else starts watching it I lose interest.  Here I am, really liking something, but I'm not hearing the word of mouth I'm used to hearing.

Hemlock Grove.

Netflix original series.

Watch it.

OK, what else?

I started a Group on Atheist Nexus for Exorcism Survivors.  Just watched the extended director's cut of Blatty's original move The Exorcist.  www.atheistnexus.org/profiles/…

For all you non-believers out there, I would highly recommend atheistnexus.  Good people, good discussions.  Every now and again you get your Christian Troll, but hey, they're fun to slice and dice if you're into that thing.  Me, I have little time to waste with Christians.  They are ignorant people who believe in nonsense.  And the 'spiritual but not religious' types burn my britches.  You can doll it up by calling it 'spiritual' but the true descriptive term is 'superstition."

They want to couch the discussion in terms of Faith Vs Reason, but the opposite of Reason isn't Faith.

The opposite of Reason is Irrationality.

So the discussion is really about Reason Vs Madness.

I don't mind you being Superstitious, I don't care if you are Mad.

Just don't try to drag me down to your level.

Seriously, we have this insane problem with superstition in the US...and since the US is the source of so much nonsense...around the world.  OK, I'm an Old Fart and proud of it. But getting older means having more experience, having tried out more things along the way and found what works and what doesn't.

The difference between a Rabbit's foot and a Crucifix is you don't have to kill a rabbit.

And there's this thing I keep coming across with atheists.  I call it the Nonsense of Nostalgia.  They still want to treat the religious with a respect they don't deserve.

For crap's sake, these people are killing innocents over which name to call a deity that doesn't even exist!

Grow up.

The old superstitions will die, you can't keep them alive by getting violent.  We've had Reason for about 300 years now.  Jesus has been rotting in his grave for 2000 or so and religion has been around since God was in diapers.

In the 300 years of Rationality we've enjoyed there has been a lot of progress made.  300 years ago Baruch Spinoza couldn't just come out and say...as my favorite Gary Larsen cartoon has one cow out the herd saying "Hey, this is grass!  We're eating grass!"

What really hurts my heart is the years of wasted life religion/superstition has caused humanity.  Read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World.  In the opening pages he lays out the death rate starting in hunger gatherer times when people had a thirty year live expectancy and how that life expectancy has grown over the last couple of centuries to over eighty and, if some people are right, might become eternal at some point...the Singularity...in the next hundred years or so.

Imagine that.  Eternal life and you don't have to step foot in a church or obey any of their bullshit rules to get it!

Even without that promise of eternal life...which I'm not a big fan of anyway....like one person said "There are people who want to live forever who can't think of anything to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon."...there's still the quality of life to consider.

Imagine a world where every child grows up knowing he/she will one day die and cease to exist...after all, the mortality rate for all living things is 100 percent, everything, everyone who has ever lived and is alive today has died or will die and when they do nothing...no one...will come back.

Again, grow up.

Think what a difference in your life...in the world we live in...if every child was taught and grew up understanding that one day he/she would die and cease to exist?

How much more pleasure would we derive?  How much more freedom we would enjoy?  How much more progress would we be capable of?

If we all weren't thinking that we'd have another life, an eternal life, to get things right?

If we all knew from the beginning that if we wanted to do something....if we wanted to make the world a better place....that we had to do it now and not put if off till some pie-in-the-sky bullshit of an afterlife or another life?

If you got to do it now, if you've got to do it yourself...then you'd better-best get off your lazy bee-hind and get to work!

Pray?  Prayer is talking to the ceiling.  Belief in God or Jesus or Allah or Yahweh is belief that you don't have any responsibility.  That your sole goal in life is to make sure you please this non-existent being so you...self centered, vain  you...will get to live forever and avoid burning in Hell.

Screw that...and screw the God it rode in on.

If you want to make the world a better place then you have to do it your damn self.

God has never made the world a better place.  In the thousands of years humans believed in him and depend on him the longevity rate stayed a consistent thirty years.

It was only when people stopped believing in God and started doing things themselves that our longevity rate has grown from thirty to forty to fifty now to eight or ninety years.

Believing in God is not believing in yourself.

And like my Grandma Jarrett always said:

You can shit in one hand and have faith in the other

Then see for yourself which one gets filled up first.

This is fun.  I should post more journal entries.

So, tonight's message is simple:

Grow up.

Believe in yourself.

Change the world.