Please, don't make me lip sync Tina Turner.

Not the way I had hoped to leap back into mine own small blogging world, a moat-sized affair, after a six month or so stint spent dog-paddling in a chlorinated Olympic pool, but we don't get to be in charge of our own relevance -- at least not for a bit.

It's a relief not to be relevant, except, of course, in those instances where I hold the key, the definition, the path, the road map, and the most minute details of Being Right.  Then it's so -- stomping::feet -- frustrating.

Though, again, it's a relief.  I don't have to do anything.

I don't have to don a uniform, nor even dither around with wearing haute couture camo.

I don't have to have my skin, that largest of organs, peel and fall away from vascularized flesh, or have mucous membranes pretty much necrotize on the spot.

I don't have to have any ability to aid, ease, cure, ameliorate, or euthanize stymied by lack of supplies and an overabundance of need.

I don't have to be held hostage by an idiot electorate and its idiot elected representatives.  I don't have to shrink in horror at the echo of mine own words, "not time-sensitive." Were I a man, I am guessing that's a moment when one's testicles withdraw to ear level.

I don't have to be Richard Engel's moral sidekick if I don't feel like it.  I can change the station.  I can forget that Assad will see this as an unscheduled, unexpected extra play period.  I don't have to feel the bile rise in my esophagus, knowing that my life, my childrens' lives, have been measured and found meaningless.

Yes, I have a thang for Richard Engel.  I think he speaks my truths more often than not, though I've noted that he also does stuff about them.  A minor discord.  Truth-speakers need cheerleaders, too. Yay, Richard Engel!  No, I'm not smiling either.

I don't embarrass easily and the fact that our Congress was not immediately called to Washington but was, rather, left to choke on Summer's last wieners and burgers -- better now that we are all foodies -- and put off the "debate" until 9 September, well, that probably has nothing to do with why I can only swallow yogurt.

I went 24 hours without speaking, a respite for everyone.  My vision is blurry because I got confused -- which drops had I put in, which had I put in too often, which were totally forgotten.  I began coughing up blood with my jellied yellow sputum, nothing alarming, I don't think, just a result of force.  I cough like a commando.

When I think of what I wish to blog about, I cannot think.  I long, instead, for things you're used to hearing about -- sleep free from the world's sluttiness, sleep free from dreams of not finding the class, or the classroom, in which I was scheduled to teach, an hour ago.  Yes, I often find all my students scattered about strange buildings, in stairwells, seated alone in empty classrooms (but not ours), raising a ruckus in administration, where administrators glare at me and my long line of ducklings. I try to teach as we rush down hallways, try to make a game of it, but these are the grown ones, the college kids, and I know what they must be thinking.  Something along the lines of... "this class could double as a PE course."

When I think of what I want to say, I feel instead soft arms and hints of hugs, I hear murmurs of mothers, of fathers, of brothers, of sisters, of all of their lovers, recognized or not.  I hear no children.

I wonder what is the right prayer to pray in thankfulness for not being relevant.  Prayer, right now, is divorced, cleanly divided, from notions of encounters and dialogues.  And please don't make me lip sync Tina Turner or do other acts of penitential poignant irrelevance.

Please God, create and destroy, both, my matter...

Should I be glad that this instrument is compatible with my dearth of energy and my excess of repentance?

Please God, create and destroy, both, my matter... 

If we could but distract God for a forever instant, maybe we'd have a chance.  That can be my meaningfulness.  It still professes my cowardice and guilt, but might also gift humanity with the moment it needs, might allow for felonious acts to fall on a felonious physical body, an error from the get-go, creating a wondrous loop of meaninglessness within which you all can choose to finally trim that annoying cuticle on your left thumb, or slaughter the Idiot Think of the Lying Liars and become a worthy dream, not of Marvel Heroes but of marvelous one-by-ones.

Bomb his planes, his weapons' caches.  Kill him and his heinous cohorts in that moment where an old LP spins on the platter, skipping, skipping.  Extra-judicial executions, approved by the death penalty abolitionist too right, too sick to mince her words.  Do I deify myself?  Die for attention?  Do I damn myself, deified while standing on my aching head?  Die for distraction?  Sure thing, let's worry about those questions.

Please God, create and destroy, both, my matter... 

© 2013 L. Ryan