"Ends"

-Everlast

Maybe. If I were to ever write anything, I would call it You, me, and the Escatons. But I will never write. And I have nothing to say about the ends. (What ends?) But I hear about it a lot these days. I have decided to look into Christianity again. Since High School, I have been there and I have been back again, and I haven't given much thought to religion in the meantime. So I start where I always start these days. With the academy. I don't work any more. I listen to lectures that Yale put up a couple years ago. I'm making my way through the curriculum. They are mostly just entry-level classes, but I don't care. Anything for a taste. And so I found the religious studies department. And I went out and bought the most liberal Bible I could get my hands on and started reading. I read the historic-cirtical critique of the gospels and Paul. (I don't care much for Paul) And then I read about the history of Religion in America, and the book was so boring, Jesus isn't mentioned once. Paul isn't either, but they just say Calvin, Calvin, Calvin. The history of Religion in America is Calvin. This is why I had to stop being a history teacher. I can only say "Calvin" so many times before I become maddeningly depressed. Where is the sadness in the world? It seems like America is oppression and nobody bothers to be sad about it. We are the un-elect. We, the un-elect, who sit at our desks listening to the Yale lectures or the Daily Show in the background, staring at graphs to make it look like I'm working. Always working. I'm never working, ever bored. I want to rip open my Bible and find the saddest verse in the whole damn thing, some pitiful wail of some lost prophet, probably. I would paste it to every wall in the dirty city. So that I can feel again. I am stuck here. Stuck in my charts, in the endless lines of code that don't mean anything or do anything. I am trapped with dozens of engineers. I can never tell if they are as bored as I am, or if they are thrilled with the thought of every day. I have no right to complain. I am wailing in the desert. I am the un-elect. Where in America can we be sad about that? Maybe my brother knows. He, who is in the throes of passion. He works too hard and takes too many drugs. He is living life in the trenches. Maybe. I am removed here. Removed from everything but the gentle, slow condemnation of John Calvin and endless Puritans. And I can't complain because I am somehow winning. Or treading water. But in America, even that is winning. Where is life? Where does it end? What is the span? What is its measure? What depth?  

Look. I am alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less...