Darkness On The Edge Of Our Towns

Something a Little Wilder Today

Clinton, New Jersey. Not exactly my hometown in rural Hunterdon County, but close and I spent a lot of time there. Big ol’ single screen movie theater (R.I.P.), best local comic book shop (R.I.P.), romantic Main Street for dates alongside the Raritan River, and my dear friend Dave who looks like Johnny Depp lived there with his girlfriend in a 19th Century mansion split into apartments. I had an additional 1,500 words in this thing about how the cremated ashes of the most influential occultist of the past 150 years, British author/poet/spy/magician Aleister Crowley, somehow ended up getting either spread or buried in Hunterdon County, roughly six miles from my house. This is odd not only because you’d figure it’s an obscure place for a larger-than-life not-American who started his own religion to end up, but also because I only learned of Crowley’s remains becoming ingrained in the ground of Hunterdon County last year, even though I’ve been reading about him since 1985. But that’s a strange story for another day, maybe.

“Main street isn't main street anymore / No one seems to need us like they did before / It’s hard to find a reason left to stay / But it's our town, love it anyway…” James Taylor, “Our Town”

“The day is runnin' down like a tired clock. So tell the truth and shame the devil.” — Thornton Wilder’s Our Town

$ $ $ $ $ $ 

Can’t sleep. Not sure why.

Wait. I do know why. Massive lightning/thunderstorms rolled through Blue Texas at 1:47am, or at least 1:47am is when one of the the thunderclap blasts woke me. After that, it was a few more lightning flashes muted by closed bamboo shades, subsequently accompanied by loud rumbling thunder and the counting of seconds in the dark to discover the distance, which I’m not even sure is legit (is it?), followed by me feeling slightly unsettled because my home is surrounded by many trees, until I went downstairs and slid open the door to the deck over the garage and let the cool damp air waft over me as the lightning flashed and thunder crashed in the distance, closer and closer, then further and further, then not at all, and I tried to go back to bed but it was fruitless, wide awake now, wide away and unsettled, sensing the usual mysterious shadows of the wee small hours, not sure if they’re here for me or somebody else, everybody else, nobody else, because it certainly doesn’t feel like my time’s up yet, I’ve got more to say, things I’m sure I’ve not even thought of yet, but, then again, that’s what populist Depression-era politician Huey Long thought, too, he believed he was going to save America from FDR and the New Deal, but his last words after the Judas-like betrayal by his bodyguard who shot him to death in the Louisiana Capitol building that got blamed as usual on a fall guy patsy were: "God, don't let me die. I still have so much to do.”

Did he? Do I? Do you? Do we still have “so much to do”? Or have all the words been said, the points made, the responses delivered, the divisions established, the positions cemented, the wheat here, the chaff there, and now we just wait for the Saturn Return of a climatic Clash of Civilizations to play out however it wilt? 

I’m not saying I’m at the end of my rope. Even if I was, it’s assuredly not any kind of noose — if “they” ever try to tell you I self-deleted, it’s a lie — but seeing so many others I respect starting to lose their grip is making me wonder more and more about just ejecting, going somewhere really rural and waiting out whatever horror is coming, cuz it’s coming, it’s coming, I bet at least half of you know it too, can feel it too, probably more than half in fact, if you read my Substack with any regularity, because I’ve apparently conjured a sometimes-weird space that attracts the best sometimes-weird people, or at least weird-adjacent, and I mean that in the optimum possible way, a path appropriate for this wild unbalanced time when “the weird turn pro,” and if it’s not dawned on you yet that Things Are Not What They Seem, and the only real remaining question is just how much are they not what they seem, now might be the moment to start chewing over that question, bite down hard, because the longer I live the more I think: _____________________ . Knowhutimean? 

Maybe you don’t. Honestly, my state of mind has not been the same since April 8th, Eclipse Day, when I listened to the latest episode from the esoteric historians and contemporary philosophers at Truthstream Media, who dropped a weighty and emotional video kinda sorta about the eclipse despite being called “This Video Is Not About the Eclipse,” from the very smart critical thinking husband-and-wife team of Aaron & Melissa Dykes, who used to work for Infowars and Alex Jones until they got too popular on their own and either jumped or got pushed into launching their own thing. 

“All that is now, and all that is gone, and all that’s to come, and everything under the sun is in tune…But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.” - Pink Floyd

The Truthstream Media video shattered me. The barely-a-half-hour entry wasn’t so much about the eclipse as it was lamenting corporate media and government fear-mongering, the steady deluge of demoralizing infotainment designed to make you feel frightened and garbage-tier, and how we all need to rise above it, to rise above them, and embrace the little joys of life, because the joys are there and will sustain us. It was a nice message yet would’ve been a lot more convincing and uplifting and inspiring if Melissa, the woman doing the voice-over, didn’t start breaking down and bursting into tears and then gut-wrenching sobs, over and over, dwelling upon her grand wish and the purity of her soul’s desire for all of us to get along better and pursue things that elevate us and not let “them,” whoever “they” are, degenerate our existence, our essence, our very humanity, with fear and loathing, and how much easier it could all be, yet how difficult a very tiny percentage of unfathomably wealthy people make it for the rest of us, and she implored listeners to look more closely at the heavenly grandeur that surrounds our lives, please, please, please look, a raw and primal cri de coeur to put down the phones and get offline, stop needlessly consuming, see past the superficiality of our programmed phony world, look around you and see things, really see things, as they are, not how we’re told that they are, much like what is seen and felt by the tragic ghost of the young woman who dies in childbirth and is granted one free day to return to her small rustic New Hampshire hometown of Grover’s Corners in Thornton Wilder’s beautiful, heartbreaking Pulitzer-Prize-winning play Our Town, "the greatest American play ever written,” where the common is revealed as profound and the profound is missed by the many and the Living and The Dead intermingle for a brief birthday experience that reveals…that reveals...well, why should I give it away? I’m not here to be your Cliff’s Notes for great Art. You can watch a 2003 television adaptation of the play here, for free, with Paul Newman in his last stage role as the wise, grounded yet ethereal “Stage Manager.” It will make you cry, if you still have the capacity. I hope you do. I hope we all do. That’s how hard and beautifully painful its Truth hits. 

Everything may be a lie, this very realm itself a blasphemous inversion, the “Upside Down,” but there is still Truth to be found in great Art, sadly, mostly of the past. Which/Witch is why all these billion-dollar globalist entertainment conglomerates run by empathy-absent swine are trying to “reimagine” the classics as generic gormless soulless feelings-free fodder for an as-yet unrealized “modern audience” of human cattle (complete with nose ring!) who have lost the ability to feel much of anything. People who feel things can do things. People who feel nothing do nothing.

It’s gotten to the point where I wonder whether anything contemporary is true any more, frankly, besides the Love I am grateful to feel for my children, a few family members and the one or three dear friends who the past six years have not transmogrified into unrecognizable mind virus zombies. Once you realize history is as fake as the news, and that there are entire prior advanced civilizations buried under our feet that have been intentionally obscured by history’s victors, and perhaps worse than that, maybe even untethered to what we perceive as “Reality,” it’s tough to take any of this seriously. In some ways, I’m continually trying to resist the urge to think I’ve already “won” this game — except “It’s No Game,” as Bowie told us — and I don’t want to play along anymore, and maybe by not playing along anymore is how I “win.” Of course, the polarity of this world also means that the moment you think you’ve won, you lost. So I guess I keep playing.

“Silhouettes and shadows, watch the revolution / To be insulted by these fascists is so degrading / And it’s no game…” — from the late great David Bowie’s best album, Scary Monsters, which artistically attempted to lift the veil of the fascist architecture being constructed under the feet of the fickle, fashion-fascinated masses. In hindsight, it appears he may have flown too close to the flame with that one, for when Bowie finally returned after an almost four year silence, with the shallow pop star blockbuster Let's Dance, he offered little more lyrically than a suggestion to detach and enjoy the ride down. Biggest album of his career, of course. By far. From “It’s No Game” to “Put On Your Red Shoes And Dance.” IYKYK.

Except there’s always the potentiality of more souls to be saved; it’s worth a shot. Maybe even our sick, dying civilization can be rescued, though that’s looking like a darker and darker scenario, odds-wise, since free-falling American society has been schemed into a schizophrenic self-hating suicidal state of programmed mental illness, and it very much looks like history repeating itself for an exceedingly poorly educated nation that never learned its history and is thus doomed to repeat it, seemingly via the designs of people who do know their history and understand it all too well. 

I’d love to be more optimistic about all this, really I would, but that Truthstream Media thing was a real gut punch, especially if you’re one of those people who believes the stomach is the location of the soul. The smart and deeply empathetic woman who spoke so simply yet profoundly from her heart in that video seems so So SO far removed from the hellbound hellhound direction most of American society has taken, it’s like night and day, with too many people choosing night.

Of course, I might be wrong. I’ll give the last word to the Stage Manager of Our Town, his closing monologue, shared many decades after I first saw the play and almost as many years after I did my best to embody the iconic role filled by talents far greater than I, in an amateur production back in the 1980s. What he’s saying, I’m not sure, exactly. But maybe that’s the point. We figure it all out later. So buck up, Melissa. I’m rooting for you. For all of us. It’s no game.

“Most everybody's asleep in Grover's Corners now. There are a few lights on. Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable somebody's setting up late and talking. Yes, it's clearing up. There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk…or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. Hmmmm…Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners…You get a good rest, too. Good night.”