I want to write a small story in which our camera just takes pictures of the everyday life, you know, like the beginning of a horror movie when the family is happily safe. The lights are warm yellow. They are unaware. It's not a security camera probing the darkness with infrared, not a black and white drone footage that goes supernova, not a shaky bodycam where the panting is from running and not looking back, and certainly not a big articulated TV on a wide swing-arm zooming on a pasted up old-man face making forceful hand gestures, or following an ambulance, a police car, a hurricane with gale force winds ripping leaves from hairline branches like a thirties looney toon. Not like how I can go on and on, enumerating a dark list that fades into history, that doesn't ignore a particular geography older than film or even writing.

I want a father and a mother who are not at each other's throat for the difficulty of existence in an uncaring and amoral world where reason is continuously twisted for the plain agenda of greed much worse than depicted in fairytales in which wolves have a right to children, to pigs' houses just because they're poor and not strong. Not savvy. Not of the right shade.

I want the interactions of the family to be devoid of domination. Not a God of punishment sitting in the table's throne and ignoring what makes people happy, always warning of a bleak future unless sacrifice is made on a minute by minute basis, of the stress of no money except for alcohol, no fun except for two minute clips of desire and crass voyeurism. In the service of the agenda.

The camera shows all the creases of the old woman worn by toil, the strained features of the man who can no longer provide by honor, not selling drugs or anything so obviously illegal, you have to be strong for that, no, a little falsification here and there, small theft, service charges up and down the hierarchy, the higher, the bigger the sums exchanged until at the apex nothing but the grand merchandise of death, or else.

I want children to be with each other, instead of with incomprehensible adults hinting at dark mysteries, all manners of unpleasantness, unbalance, unsatisfied yearning at the edge of puberty that will rob them of their natural beauty, the beauty of the natural world to confine them to little squares of unobtainable fame, the flames striking like firecrackers under their feet, plotting soap operas to fan away the gloom of solitude and the loneliness of inadequacy.

I want a warm religion full of gentleness and the possibility of bliss if not enlightment, instead of boosting your identity at the expense of the otherworldly. Where the sacred text does not justify massacre for unbelief. Where the body is a friend and simple pleasures not a death sentence. Where the mind is free to roam and examine alternatives to wholesale you-are-with-us-or-against-us. Where judgment is not rooted in medieval and barbaric times, not when you can easily compare with your own eyes. Where control is not paramount. And why should it be if just?

I want the house to be esthetic, light filled with views of trees, preferably cherry and walnut and mulberry, with birds eating their fruit and singing their praise. That they're not as afraid of the humans as the predators that we are. So little flesh anyways. That the families are not squeezed into tight spaces with no privacy to think. The noise of life incessantly loud and in the ear, the threat of eviction the underlying condition. That things could always be far worse still. On the street, or in humanitarian camps. On inflatable boats adrift. Who does that for just money? We all do. As we read on the excesses of the very few, the anointed, the wolves with rights, with lawyers, guns, governments, modern temples pointing to the sky, away from the ordinary life, the only life we truly know.


Jam24