As lYou’ve invested so much of yourself into your national identity as a gun carrying old west hero that your life has become a spaghetti western from which you cannot disentangle yourself. You wake every morning wondering how the saloon whores got you out of your pants without removing your chaps, but it wasn’t saloon whores, it was syphilitic clowns and you were roofied because no amount of gun protects you against your own appetite for gross idiocy. – The American character as Angelina sees it.

Second person point of view is not an easy perspective to tell a story in but I think I’ve got one in me that will some day have to come out. It might be the making of me. It might be the one I’m working on right now. I’m listening to the Mauro Ermanno version of “Bang Bang” and it screams for a second person narrative.

There is a tremendous amount of ugly in the world. There always has been. It will not dissipate just because we wish it so. We have to each work our asses off to combat it with liberal applications of love and spirit graffiti across the troubled sleep of the haunted and the graves of our neighbors. Fighting the ugly doesn’t require God, or faith of any kind. I have no faith and believe in no God and yet I possess the tools of peace in my heart. I often lack hope and yet still I slog forward seeking what will add to the counterbalance of evil. I do it because I do still (against my better judgement) have love.

There is one thing, above all others, that will add weight to love, to light, and to hope in this world: do for others. It need not be people you do for. People pretty much suck most of the time, like hangry ticks. You want to add weight to love and peace but kind of hate humans? Do for other creatures. Do for domestic or wild non-human animals. Nurture a being that’s hungry, or scared, or sick. Wake up in the morning and feed the birds in your garden. Or feed a stray cat. Or leave something out for squirrels. Or volunteer at a wild animal rescue center. Or go walk dogs at your local animal shelter. Or sew dog beds or cat beds for any/every local-to-you organization that could use them.  Save a spider if you have the guts. I’m not fucking kidding, whores.

Do for others.

You won’t see a difference in the news. Not really. You won’t see a lot of evidence of change just because you’re doing for others.

But you’ll feel it in your marrow.

There’s something I want desperately to explain but I’m not sure this is the moment. I want you all to understand how I can extend myself in the most cheerful and honest way even when I’m dying inside. Even when I’m struggling hard against the irrepressible tide of my depression. The cheer I extend isn’t fake. It isn’t a steroid version of my emotions. It’s genuine. It represents my ability to feel a deep rift in my spirit, in my mind but separate it from my experience of you. When I see you I recognize your pain, which is my pain. When I see you I recognize your struggles, which are my struggles. When I see you I recognize your broken bones, which are my broken bones too.

It’s you that lights the light in me on the darkest days.

The light in me answers to the darkness in you. The lightness in you answers to the dark in me. We survive on reciprocation. We die without it.

Do for others.

But don’t be a fucking martyr about it because martyrs are the most tedious people EVER and I want to feed them raw potatoes and eggplant.