The Baby Screams

Any moment now...

In just a second, there will be a flash and it will be all over. It will be hot but then we will be like cigarette ashes blown off a table. Anyone who doesn't die in the flash will be taken by a storm of fire that blows like the wind every fall. The fire will be put out eventually by poison rain and then it will be winter for a very long time.

Any second... if you wait for it, maybe you can find a way to hide.

I clearly remember staring out of the window of my third grade class in a north western direction for hours on end, oblivious to most of what was going on around me. In my mind, there was no way it could not happen. I envisioned the cold war much like a stand off between myself and my younger brother, which clearly meant that the person in the wrong would strike first. Fusion bombs would take the place of a hand full of mud and governments would argue like my parents did from time to time. There would be nothing I could do. We lived in a community that serviced a nuclear reservation that was created for the sole purpose of manufacturing weapons. In my mind, this made us a primary first strike target. My grandfather agreed with this bit of logic.

Of course it didn't help that I was fascinated by every facet of the technology involved. Fighter jets and bombers that could break the sound barrier, atoms split to heat homes and power video games. My grandfather and I used to go to airshows hosted by the military and marvel at what the cutting edge of science and physics had conjured up to keep America safe. Solid and finite, the logic behind such weapons seemed as strong as the resolve of those that kept up the stand off that was the cold war. I took some safety in that, but not much. I remember that year my mother asking where I went when I would stare off out the window. I know she thought I was day dreaming and sometime I was, but truth be told, I was always a little too shy to reply 'I was just wondering if there are Soviet children that are as afraid a I am.'

In the fourth grade, it was the concept of infinity that wrecked my mind. For hours on end, I would test human reasoning against the idea that there was truly no end to how we assign quantities and attempted to fathom the implications that this held. I would imagine, as I still do, the days of the year written one by one on register tape, the way my kindergarten teacher did and how it must loop back around. After years of mind numbing clashes between science and philosophy, I found a minor level of resolve in realizing that the only way it could be truth is if math is a human construct describing the indescribable.

I have to look at it like this: I can draw a tree. I can paint a tree. I can make a digital model of a tree in more ways that I can count. I can take a picture of a tree. I can write a description of a tree in two languages. But none of these efforts ever becomes the tree; the tree still is, despite my human efforts to understand and describe it. Some interpretations of the tree are more accurate than others, yet in the end, none are the tree. Even as philosophy will never quite know, science will never be certain, because they are both human constructs. 

I have struggled with depression fueled by thoughts like this for most of my life. While depression isn't exemplified by any one of these situations, the way my mind tends to battle with its self is; sometimes an overly noisy mind can lead me to very dark places. We are all hardwired to ask 'why' and for some reason, I have always taken that to extremes. When one can find no absolutes anywhere, there seems to be no reason for anything. What does it matter if I'd have drank myself to death in some drab apartment in southeast Portland, if I could rationalize no meaning out of life?

There have been times where I have looked in on others living there lives in a sort of ignorant bliss like one might find in a shopping mall. As an invisible bystander, I have watched the wooden smiles of others and peeked in through the glass at goods I could never enjoy, because I've known from a young age that the prize found in a solid piece of mind is elusive, intangible and yet it must be the foundation on which greater happiness is built. I used to wonder if if that was ever possible. For a very long time, I didn't think it was even a reality that other people truly stood in. Their fakery made me bitter, as I though them stupid for not waking up and looking further, for ignoring my inability to figure out what they pretended to know.

Not long ago, I wrote about a time when I was prompted to save my own life. My realization then, that we are only as secure as we allow ourselves to be, was an eye opener to be sure, but it would not be for several more dark years that I would come full circle and figure out what my problem was. While it's impossible to oversimplify such a personal journey, I am sure that my experience has a commonality on some base level with that of other's experiences only in the way that the stanzas of a poem rhyme. The peace that I've found will likewise may not be the answer for any one else.

But that isn't to say that there is never hope for anyone and that's the first step in the right direction.