Lafayette or: How to Fight a Monster

It’s a wild thing to come home. It’s a rare thing to be happy somewhere.

I woke up this morning with the feeling of a titan emerging from the earth below. Brash and strong and challenged. The trees now bend towards my brow and pathways turn themselves to my liking. It’s familiar terrain and faces. I see the people I love lining up along side the gutters of the streets shouting proverbs to the air with cake and booze in their hands. It’s the sky falling to greet a lost son… kind of thing. You get it. You get it. You’ve come home before as well.

I just got back from a trip that lead me to a movie theater in Lafayette where a man lost the core of himself at the expense of others. He indulged in the company of a monster for too long and finally bowed to him. He was afraid and he wanted to hurt people. And that fear lead him straight into the storm of mental illness that tore through his mind for years.  And in the eye of that storm is where he meet his monster. I think true things are discovered about one’s self in a moment like that. Strength, hope, selflessness, sanity. And when he bowed to that master in his mind, he was admitting he had very little of any of those attributes. The storm passed and he was a servent to a source of hatred that he couldn’t see past anymore. And that hate lead him to the end of a slick, dark road that had a very defining end. A cliff. A ledge that stood over chaos and pain. And he jumped in and splashed a wave of sickness over helpless strangers.

And those strangers were teachers, and shop owners, and friends, and fathers, and mothers, and daughters, and sons. All with beating hearts and blinking eyes. Real people with their own little storms and challenges. Each fighting in the core of a strong wind to find the strength to be happy. The hope to be kind. The selflessness to be charitable. The sanity to be dependable.

And that’s the thing the man with the gun hated and that’s what his monster reacted to. The goodness of others shining back in his eyes. He held a mirror that he constantly asked the same question to. “Who’s the fairest of them all?” And the mirror would respond with any name but his. Until he smashed its reflective surface all over the floor of movie theater in Louisiana. And it created a fucking nightmare. And no one really knows how to deal with it.

The way my brain works is to set things out in a row. Simply. And find a point. Something to hold on to during a confusing moment.

So, I start with the people we lost and their meaningful lives.

And then the community effected by that loss.

And then the man who harmed them.

And then his sickness.

And then the reaction of the public.

And then the fading of that reaction.

And then the pain that stays for a small core of people that are changed forever by that loss.

And then myself.

And with my beating heart and clear head I think this: It’s important to identity yourself by the good things in your life.

Because the planet flies out of control through a dark universe constantly spinning with molten plates at its core. And we fight generationally to form sane and happy communities on it’s surface. Places that allow us to live with order and fairness and safety. Within that, we chase a feather of an idea…  meaning. A reason to wake up and to be good to each other. A reason that  never came naturally to us until we found that weird, magical bonding element that is love. And it tied us to each other. And we found a way to set down the monster and become selfless. In our hearts, we knew that was the secret to happiness and order. And that’s why it’s so heartbreaking when someone can’t join in on the vision. That’s why we’re so effected when a monster smashes a mirror all over the blue prints of the thing we finally love.

And the only way I’m figuring out how to fight back against that fucker is to bundle up all the good things about being alive and covering myself in them. I’m creating a gooey shield of strength and hope and selflessness and sanity that drips across the floor and out the door as I grab a bottle of booze and a handful of cake. And I make my way to stand in the gutters of the streets singing proverbs to the sky above. Until the sky falls down to kiss my head. And the ground below and the sun above echoes the voices of the people we lost whispering in my ears, “You are home. You are home. You are home.”