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The feelings passed, but not the memories, and that forlorn pounding grew inside of him of everything that’d been lost or abandoned, until finally the inside of his head felt coated with layer after layer of failing paint.

At night he would lie in his bed wondering what had become of the windows and the light, barely remembering what brightness had felt like.  Yes, it’d been so bright once, he’d think, picking at chips of the peeling paint, chewing on them one by one, poisoning himself.

Some experimental spoken Word Shadows

Thinking a little this morning about the hermit and what motivated him, I started wondering about the multitude of problems we all confront on a daily basis, which led to some rather random ideas regarding the source of these troubles.

Sin, of course, is thrown out there as one of the religious-based causes.  Mankind’s internal flaw that must be redeemed in order to alleviate the pain and suffering of our lifetime of problems for all eternity.  I won’t get into my thoughts on that one, other than to say, blah, blah, blah.

Several things came to mind, but you know, the one thing that stuck in my mind this morning is the possession of land.  Ownership.  That “need” of possession that somehow has intrenched its way so deeply into our lives that it’s hard to even imagine it being any other way, and yet, the very description most (shaky ground here, for me) religions give of their own afterlife.  Odd, it seems.

Could everything possibly hinge on ownership in one way or another?  Couldn’t profit, for instance, (one of my favorite anti-western philosophy whipping boys), which is arguably either an offshoot of greed or solid economic policy, depending on your particular stance, boil down even further into the by-product of simply ownership?  Think of it.  Everything seems tied in one way or another to ownership or possession, and the person who attempts to form any sort of happiness or life style outside of this accepted, planetary wide way of living, is a person setting themselves up for unavoidable failure.  Living within the walls of possession-style thinking is hard enough, that living outside the walls has become a virtual impossibility.

Random thoughts, hopefully leading to development of the hermit.

• Possession is forced upon us.
• Money becomes proof that you are obeying the rules of possession and ownership.
• Simply seeking shelter and food has been taken away as an option.
• Every choice and every thought has been altered to revolve around ownership.
• The laws of ownership outweigh the idea of individuality.
• There is, in fact, no such thing as individual right.

Maybe the hermit traces his own fractured life down paths where all the problems and stresses eventually begin to share this common denominator of ownership, and that he begins to realize the human inability to happily and effectively live within such a demanding and impossible system.

I’m over-thinking the whole thing, of course.  All we’re talking about is a story about a hermit, a ghost, and some bones, after all.  But aren’t all stories just something more about ourselves?  Attempts to explain why we are?  How we got here?

This morning the plot for the hermit’s story came together so smoothly that it surprised me, even as I sat here, typing it out.  Can it be that obvious, I thought.  Really, was this under my nose the whole time and I didn’t see it?  It’s very exciting around here right now, if, that is, you happen to think a man in his pajamas, with a laptop, a cup of coffee, and a workable plot qualifies as excitement. 

Is it the potential of a good idea that gives the thrill, or is it the moment of discovery, that instant of time when you feel the idea converge with you, and for that brief moment you feel at one with something you’ve been reaching for? 

I’ve never climbed a mountain, but I imagine the thrill begins the very second you realize you have a workable plan, and that the climb has moved from wishful thinking and become an eventual reality that now advances towards you.  Because I think that’s the feeling I’m trying to explain, right there.  The feeling of something coming at you, rather than you struggling to get to it.  That’s the moment it becomes thrilling, when the direction changes and you nearly lose your stomach because the change is so sudden, so unexpected, even though you were looking for it all along.

It was worse before the arm, he’d told me one day, but that was before the girls had stopped looking his way, or at least, before he’d started thinking they were looking his way.

My mind would drift something terrible, he’d said, going on to tell me about some girl back in college, a swimmer with muscles so taut that any man in his right mind would want to lose himself in that body.

And she’d been there, he’d said, spread out on the floor naked with that body, spread out wanting to give him anything that he’d had a mind to take, and he’d tried, lord knows he’d tried, but then his mind would start to drift and he’d find himself thinking about where they were, or what it meant that they were there on the floor, rather then upstairs in his bed, or the story she’d told him about the summer ahead of her, and what she’d look like, moving around southern California with her people.  Who were her people?  He knew he wasn’t, and yet there he was, on that floor, kissing her while his mind played tricks on him.

I’ve got time now, he’d said.  Lots of time, with the arm and all.  Time to think about what went wrong, and what I could possibly have been thinking about.  All the fucks that never happened, he’d called it.  Never happened and never will.  Then he’d rolled down his sleeve while I stared at the hook, thinking about the girl.