Author: Matthew Rodriguez

Prodigy and Havoc at it again.

Hell on Earth this time.

These kids are teaching me something. Something the ancients new about long ago.

I don’t want to be hard on them, but they need a guide, or they’ll be lost in the Chaos.

They need no further examples of mediocrity, only a balanced education by people who stopped and started giving a damn

for the future Generations, for the future of the Children of Men.

A lesson today can save them a lifetime of pain, and some positive encouragement goes a long way.

“Don’t stare down at that screen. Look both ways, look around you. Good job, give me five.”

“So, tío, about those marshmallows…?”

I wrote so many in college, but what were they all for? Oh, that’s right, for a grade.

At least that’s what they taught me in high school.

It occurred to nobody to mention it was an exercise in critical thinking –wisdom building.

Smart enough to realize, but too young to be Captain of my own ship to navigate the seas of knowledge all by myself in the Valley between Caribbean mountains.

They shut down the schools for months to deal with the mess they built or manufactured for Greed’s sake at our young souls’ expense.

And now two years from a decade ago, the big storm devastated the land, smashing the crops that remained, and home is still a mess.

They just keep talking nonsense on the news, following in the footsteps of the errors of the past with not enough opposition.

But that is about to change.

Things might somewhat change for the better in the external, but seemingly the internal will always be haunted despite knowledge that should appease it.

Whether you think or not, the horrors are there.

It is their home, and like the Madrileños from Olivo street, refuse eviction.

A Baptist man stops me at a flea market as I think of the horrors and asks me: “What would you say if at Heavens gates you were asked ‘why should we let you in?'” I say to him, “I tried to be a good guy.”

But he says all I have to do is leave it in God’s hands,

And so I try.

 

It is ironic how so many of us became so glued and addicted to our own creations.

To solve some problems, we created so many more, and

Will our shortsightedness lead to our premature doom or will we listen to the wise sometime?

You can go a whole life, and whole generations with you, not knowing so many important things, but

How far away are we from the statement: “Huh, you don’t like real girls” in a casual conversation?

There comes a time when you’ve gone through something so many times it doesn’t make any sense to go through it anymore.

It is, however, difficult to recover. Difficult to become someone else. Some help is always warranted.

Time got you this far, maybe just give it a little more time.

In here, in this place I can feel my heart starting to give out like a warning that my time has begun to run out, and I wonder if these are merely poetic musings or anatomical realities vested upon me through lineage.

My time along with everyone else’s began running out the minute we stepped out from nothingness into this reality, to live and exist until all this is no more.

Until there is no memory of it at all.

And the unanswerable shall too vanish, for there will be no one left to ponder.

It was a night around this time six years ago when I was on my way to pick up the blonde for our first date. I was a stranger in that structure patrolled by twelve paws.

In the darkness of the night, I approached and saw the four paws that caught my attention.

She seemed friendly, so I made the mistake of touch and was greeted by a swift little bite. A bite that would lead to six years of on and off belly rubs, seekings of warmth, and her little temper tantrums.

Six years that went by in five minutes. Mini is no more now, she no longer suffers, but I cannot see her anymore in her little sweaters, jumping on the couch to lay on my chest.

She is missed.

I miss her.

I was planning to make my move to The Walled City when a woman who I grew up with contacted me, saying she needed my help. However surprised I was, I accepted unsure of what that decision would bring or how it would alter the path I was on.

She commissioned me to care for two little jewels in a land surrounded by lakes where people build things out of colorful blocks. There it seemed I was destined to carve out the next chapter of this story, unplanned, unbeknownst, seemingly orchestrated by an unseen hand that shapes everything.

Sitting out on the rooftop porch again, looking at the trees,

thinking, writing.

It’s cloudy, windy, and rainy.

A plane’s engines are heard overhead along with a dog’s bark in the distance.

A man’s voice speaks over a loudspeaker, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.

Perhaps a holiday caravan?

The sounds interrupt my main writing and so I stop to write this.

A writer’s best interruption is more writing.

A new year isn’t a time to become perfect and infalible such is what

dreams are made of.

A new year is instead a time to leave unhelpful habits behind,

unhelpful thoughts, unhelpful behaviors in favor of the

beneficial.

A time to chase down goals meaningful to you.

A time to foray your markers as best you can without delay.

A new year will you waste?

or

will you

Carpe Diem?