Untitled Narrative - part 2 - Matt Cummins

[Continued from part 1]

I had all the non-sexy sexiness that I could handle for one day. It was time to delve into something a little more important- a box of Starcrunch cookies. My journal had been neglected for the past few weeks as my time became consumed by my never-ending search for the reason behind the largest group control project in history- as I saw it. I chose a spot sitting on a park bench where I could still see the ocean in the distance. Large bodies of water had always been a source of inspiration for me; I could never explain why. Maybe it was a reminder that there was a great unknown out there, needing to be discovered. Maybe the ocean’s beauty gave me reason to believe there was something missing to the puzzle that was spiritual. Looking out at the water made me want to believe. And this inspiration was apparent in my writings.

Sitting in this bench on a hill in the park was therapeutic but that was only part of the reason I was here. Parks were a place for people from all walks of life. Truthfully, there was always a chance to engage in a good discussion with a passerby. That and, on the rare occasion, when I wanted to get away for a moment I could retreat there.

I checked my watch to make sure that I hadn’t sat for too long. Eventually I would have to go home, open my laptop and start grinding off some of my daily writing that I had been putting off. I had graduated from Western Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a minor in Creative writing. Shortly after I had earned a spot writing for a couple of different magazines but only monthly. My first book was published in May of 2007; it was a book about a man fighting with his past and wandering into his obscure fate. It wasn’t much to brag about but good enough to get my foot into the revolving door of publishing. Writing was the career that I choose because I believed firmly that when I heard the Beatles song Come Together God had spoken to me in the words “one thing I can tell you is you got to be free.” Again, growing up with that whole religion thing really promoted rational thinking. Yet I had a certain amount of freedom and I was happy about that. I pictured myself, however, being the wandering artist who traveled and wrote. In no way did I ever picture myself obsessing over religion, because at that point, I was one of them- totally sold on it. But I made a decent enough living for a single man and if anyone could be considered my boss, which would be my agent Timmy, I only spoke to him once a week at most.

Writing wasn’t, however, the key to the golden life that I had sought after. Writing was a doorway into an overdeveloped sense of self-awareness that had made me walk the plank of insanity and had thrown me to the sharks. A writer spends most of his time organizing and developing thought, and not so shockingly I discovered that tending toward thought is not a very popular practice. Most people choose not to think. Most people sedate their minds during free time by watching movies or sporting events. Simply passing the time passively. Writers spend their time over-analyzing everything from the sensational to the mundane. When I began to write, I began to question my religious background. Before I had never sorted through my thoughts. I had a million questions that I wanted answers to but I was more content just following the somnambulant crowd. In a way, I was happy. I was happy because I didn’t know any different. I wasn’t worried about the ridiculousness of the belief in a literal lake of fire- fear was enough. I let someone else think for me and attempted to follow the ideals of a collective madness that had been diluted for centuries. Though I had faith, but not in myself. Before my faith was placed entirely in the names from an ancient text. I had no faith in humanity either. We were all inherently evil and we had to fight for our pass to heaven. We looked on to the next life, because, despite all of the beauty, this life was not good enough. Writing had opened my mind up to the possibility that it may be more Christ-like to place hope in your brothers and sisters.

I had found something in this whirling dust storm of religion that was inspiring. I needed to solve the puzzle. Not dismiss it, like other thinkers would. Embrace it, research it, and find what was really driving men and women to follow religion. I didn’t realize at that point what road I was leading myself down. I had merely brushed shoulders with the disillusioned and now I was on the brink of diving in headlong. Christianity was only one form of religion and to get to the bottom of my quest I was going to have to diversify my interests.

Everything has it’s opposite. One philosophical ideal that I could understand was the Yin and Yang of Taoism. In nature, everything has its opposite. As a matter of fact, opposites grant definition. Without light how could a person explain dark? Without wrong could there be a right? As cliché as this all felt it is so true fundamentally. Even down to the very matter of which we are composed- matter has its antimatter. Every Skywalker has his Vader. Mario…Bowser.

I once told an old lady who was lecturing me on the importance of baptism in between the hits she was taking off of her respirator that if I went to heaven I’d kill myself. And my reasoning would stand on the idea of Yin and Yang. Living for an eternity with no pain or suffering sounds good on a stressful day, sure. But come on. Who wants to walk on golden streets surrounded by a crystal sea and not once have a bad day. It is our nature to seek the thrills of our limitations. Pro racing for example- people only watch NASCAR because the risk of the crash. We live for danger and the banality of evil is nothing to be feared. But I’m also the guy who won’t go surfing for fear of sharks so maybe I should heed my own advice. But come on, do we really want to spend an eternity worshipping some supreme being? Why would a rational God need millions - all of those souls - for all of that adoration. And why the hell would he create us in such a way that all of our natural urges would be considered a sin? Where is the moderation of sanity?

***

Thirty yards. Thirty yards and I would be somewhere near the top of the monstrous hill that was on the verge of killing me. I hadn’t run into Lillian for a while and the thought of her had become like a mild headache- ignoring it was enough to imagine that it wasn’t there. However, I would have to wait before I called her. The last thing that I needed to do was, once again, be distracted by a girl. I am not too quick to fall in love but I am way too quick to drop everything I’m doing and get lost in the chase.

I made it! The hill had been conquered and I stood triumphant for a moment only to be belittled by the monstrosity that sat on top of the hill. Today I had agreed to go to church with my mother. My father would not be in attendance. My mother is a very strong and faithful woman. Yet I don’t think she knows why she needs church so much. For her, I believe it to be therapy. She is the type that holds everything in and rarely vents. In church she can wave her hands in the air and scream- free therapy once a week.

The only rift I had in my relationship with my mom was religion. She let on without words that she knew that I wasn’t the church-going type. And believe me nothing will guilt you more than knowing that your mom is praying for your soul’s salvation from hellfire twice a week.

Why was this church so huge? Here I am standing at the top of the largest hill over-looking this beautiful coastal town and this church stands atop the hill like the very hand of god ready to smite down any passerby. And atop the church there was an obtrusive, phallus-like steeple raping the sky! If god didn’t scare you, this building would. I had noticed a lot of churches were constructed as such. It was as if the building were screaming, “I am the house of the Lord, fear me and my giant penis…beware!”

“Why the frown?” My mother asked as she noticed the obvious look of frustration.

“Just picturing god’s dick raping us all?” I wanted to say but I refrained.

“Just thinking about something I have been writing…” I said slowly as if I were suddenly zooming back in from a distance.

We exchanged pleasantries and walked into the church together and the last image that I saw before entering was my mom, a very petite, short woman, entering into the church beneath the monstrosity. This was a “normal” non-denominational church. I had agreed to go as long as we were not going to a Pentecostal church. Yet the shape of the edifice reminded me of the Catholic Church. Women should be outraged by religion. I know that most religions started in a time where women were very oppressed. However, Christ himself was by definition a feminist. Therefore a church founded on his teaching should have taught equality from the beginning. Instead the church was structure for control- a control built around masculinity. Which is cool as hell for we men. And believe me, the Mormons really had it together but I digress. There is evidence, enough to not be ignored, that Mary Magdalene played a much larger roll in the church than the redactors would ever have allowed to be passed down to the younger generations. Christ himself had more women playing roles in his “circle” than anyone else at the time. So why would the church not embrace this? Fear. The church took the fears of the masses and played on them for centuries. And women were oppressed because of the fears of men. The insecurity of men ruled women. And that is why churches were built with a penis. As if the building itself were doing the “Man” chant. “Men men men men Men men men men!” (Only said rhythmically).

And back to reality. Here I am sitting in the church watching my mother worship, which made me feel good. I would never say or do anything to shake her faith. It had sustained her and I often had the feeling there was something she knew that I didn’t. However I needed to find it. But the harder I strove to find anything rational in religion the farther I pushed away from it. Faith is what they would tell me I was lacking but I still didn’t find this “faith” to be of any use. I had faith. I had faith but just not in ancient texts and pious dogmas. And sometimes I thought that I was striving so hard to find it because of my childhood. I watched as the tears rolled down my mother’s face while she worshipped. And for a moment I was ok with religion. I knew that the tears that she thought were falling because of the washing away of her “sins,” if a woman as sweet as my mother could truly “sin”, were actually tears of all of her pent up frustrations. She was venting, she was letting her worries and cares go. To her the tears were sins; to me she was just seeking solace and release so she could maintain her strength.

***

The waves were rolling in rhythmically. I made my way down the beach watching a light glowing ostentatiously, tempting the night. I watched as tufts of grass growing around the bottom step of the staircase of the pier blew gently in the cool, summer-night breeze. Each step was light and soft. I could feel the age of the wood creaking beneath my steps. Rrreeck! Rreeck- each step would cry out into the night. Soon there would be no sound. No sight of the beautiful stars that were dancing like the sparkle of diamonds against a soft-blue dress. No, no sight of them at all. The glowing light on the end of the pier was pulling me in like a ship being guided into shore by a lighthouse. Upon arriving at the end of the pier I joined the moths that too had found the light and I became increasingly aware of a suffocating blackness that surrounded this small beacon. I felt tied to the light, unable to leave the safety of its grasp. I leaned against the rail, which shifted accordingly to hold my weight, and admired the ocean. I took in her deep beauty, her perfect beauty. It came to me that perfect beauty had to be as hazardous as it was pleasing. If any physical beauty was true enough to embrace, it would have to be potent enough to disarm you and leave you vulnerable to its will. Only then could you survive it and take it as your own- lest you be left dead in her wake. It was then that I was suddenly taken away from myself, forced to sit away from the light as a part of the darkness. Helpless to watch my corporeal self stand staring into the ocean as three segments of a single entity raised itself from the depths. Jagged, rock-like objects protruded from the water and atop each peak of the triad sat a symbol. On one, a boy happily carrying a bag of stones, the next was a beautiful girl whose face I had become unusually familiar with and the last was a faceless man sitting cross-legged with the Star of David engraved into his forehead. And for a moment there was a foreboding silence as two dimly glowing lights shown from the depth exposing the triad for what it was. A powerful beast with three huge jaws that, with one fell-snap enclosed me and the pier then disappeared into the depth. The last thing I saw before I woke was the boy playing in the sand on the beach.

Shaking off the dream, which may have been caused by the devouring of three grotesquely over-piled chilidogs right before bedtime, I walked down the trash littered, narrow road toward the Starbucks where I had met with Lillian a few weeks ago. This time I was going there to meet David Cohen, a very close friend of mine. David and I had met three years prior when I had decided to visit a Jewish Temple for a short story that I had been writing. This particular temple was large stone building with a very classical look about it. The stones were an off-white limestone that gave the whole structure a very mid-eastern feel. Inside was as would be expected, lots of strange candles and little hats. I was so bored by the end that I realized I had dozed off and gained no resources to write about. On the way out the door I was looking for someone who looked like they could give me the information about the on-goings of the Jewish Shabbat. I was looking in particular for someone who looked to be a little different, a little off. Most of the faces I saw were very solemn- serious. It wasn’t until I passed an alleyway where I saw a young Jewish man being accosted by a pack of alley-cats that were suffering from feline distemper…ok so I made that up. He was actually a very old friend of mine. I can’t even remember a time where I did not know the “crazy Jew”- as I called him. That or I would call him the retarded bastard child of Moses.

David barely even knew that he was a Jew when I met him. If I recall it was I that had taught him the Dreidel Song. Even with the last name Cohen and the most stereotypical-Jewish mother imaginable, David still pretended to be just a little bit “gangsta”. Of course the G-unit version of David did not come about without the inspiration of the Jewish rapper Matisyahu. David’s father was an artist whose official career had ended with several big contracts to paint murals. David had inherited his father’s talent. Yet he had a different taste. His father mostly painted portraits and landscapes but David was drawn to the free styles of postmodern-abstract arts. Though he stuck with doing more traditional work to appease his parents as a child it wasn’t until he began to read a series of shorts stories that I had written in high school titled “Why to not think for yourself: 101” that David really broke away from his parents control over his ability and diversified his interests. And by this I mean that he began doing perspective based chalk-art on the streets of the city- among other things. He was also very inspired by my writing. So much so that he had incorporated text into his scenery. He began to fall in love with literature and famous quotes from the heroes of the streets from the early 90’s. It was then that Tupac and Biggie began to be sketched all over this lovely coastal town of less than 150,000 people by a Hasidic Jew named David.

When I reached Starbucks I had hoped to walk in and see a beautiful young woman listening to her iPod and working on crossword puzzles. I didn’t. Nor did I see David. I did, to my annoyance, see the barista’s Cheshire Cat grin.

“What can I whip up for ya today?!” The words burst from her mouth like the popping of a bubbled- a big overzealous bubble.

Oh Jesus. The words escaped my mouth in a startled whisper.

“Sorry sir I couldn’t hear you! How can I start your day!” I had to applaud her attitude!

“Um, I’ll have a venti mocha….thanks” I handed her a five and heard a “Thank you so very much” pervade the room.

I went to these places to start my day on a high-note. But I think that the pleasure I derived from the experience was a bit twisted. Instead of being inspired by the positive attitudes of the employees I instead left just feeling better that I as not “that” person.