Feeling down, friend? Feel like all four walls and the ceiling are collapsing in upon you? Feel like every step you make is a step in the wrong direction? Feel like every breath you take carries you that much closer to your final breath? Feel like the universe you're living in is a random accident of gaseous expansion? Feel like other human beings are way too mysterious and complicated to ever connect with on all but the most superficial levels? Feel inadequate to the task of being a participant in the gnarly realm of social discourse? Feel like people are laughing at you if, indeed, they are aware of your existence at all? Feel in your bone-essence you will end up old and alone? Feel like there's no way anyone will ever care about you?

If you're rumbling in the funk, in the lowdown blues, if you're tired of despair and that holiday sadness is creeping up on you as it always does, remember there is a path to the alleviation of suffering, a noble path, a road without maps, an anchor in the void. Put your imaginary ego away, put your precious illusions of separateness away, put your hung-up nonesuch away, and get your mind out.

Reach out for the one you love, the one you're about to love, the one you're crushing on, the one you worship from afar, the one you spend all your time with, the one you fantasize about nightly, the one you chose a long time ago, the one you haven't thought of yet, the one you sit next to in class, the one across the room you've had your eye on all night, the one you had an embarrassing dream about last week, the one you think about when there's nothing to read in the dentist's waiting room, the one you saw that time and went whoa who's that, the one you wish for when you blow out your birthday candles, the one you hold dear through every difficulty and setback and triumph and jubilation, the one you picture when you sing in the shower, the one who takes you over the moon, the one who stokes your celestial engine, the one who reminds you of everyone you've ever known, the one who has dogged your heart since time immemorial, the one who made you realize, the one who is the one, the one who taught you how to play with fire.

Doors are constantly opening all around you; it remains only for you to choose a portal. Will it be door 1 or door 2, the lady or the tiger, the pit or the pendulum, the devil or the deep blue sea, a rock or a hard place, one or the other, in or out, yes or no, all or nothing, truth or consequences, love or squalor, trick or treat, now or later, red or white, innocent or guilty, yes or no, smoking or nonsmoking, potato salad or cole slaw, Vishnu or Shiva, Skippy or Jif, smooth or crunchy, the Brady Bunch or the Partridge Family, Mary Ann or Ginger, The Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Weber, Coke or Pepsi, UCLA or USC, Democrat or Republican, heaven or hell? It remains only for you to choose a portal.

Dollars to dregs to doughnuts to dimebags, we are in the midst of a global shift, the imbalance of power an impossible fulcrum, like a see-saw with that lard-ass big kid holding his own end down and leaving everyone else up in the air, bane of the playground and bully with a behemouth appetite. But his big fat arsenal is weighing him down too, and he will inevitably succumb to the ravages of gravity. The bully ultimately bullies himself into submission. Friendless and alone his girth is a hindrance, a granite ballast, enough to sink him, a drowning descent, a diet of twinkies and pop-tarts and beernuts, a culture addicted to entertainment and consumption, a perpetual madcap savagery, a comatose cul-de-sac, a self-inflicted degradation, a humiliating defeat, the end of the American dream.

In this increasingly teetering freedom scene, baby, the global meltdown that seems to drive the ignorant toward an embrace of evil theocracies and rampant fascisms, those who keep a belief in individual destiny as a treasured vesture in their philosophic get-up must hold firm against the tendency to embrace fraidy-cat solutions to the daunting problems all about and ahead. The world is not simple, not black and white, not sacred vs. secular, not east vs. west, not liberal vs. conservative, not us vs. them, not the faithful vs. the heathen, not the believers vs. the infidels, not the sinners vs. the saved, not oil mongers vs. god mongers, but rather an interwoven and complex tapestry of inherently beautiful connectedness. In the midst of this uptight Manichean dualism, it's time for those of us who abhor the extreme and the vacuum, who resist simplistic mythologies that explain behavior with a biased child-mind in need of Nobodaddy, those of us who are dedicated to a direct experience of the world as it really is, not the way some megalomaniac mystics imagined it, not the way the shepherded many subscribe to ancient folderol, it's time for us to stand up and testify.

What is imperceptible, what is beyond or behind your sensory mechanisms is the very impulse-energy of reality itself, so grok the fullness, redeem the slippage, have a look-see at the degradation of the dimwit simpletons who dictate the business of life and hold the world hostage to primitive myth systems and ancient ignorance and primal fear, and realize your task is to subvert the backwardness of the lying creeps who hide behind scriptural dictates and other methods of social control. Face down all bases of judgment and commit yourself to a direct experience of a reality that knows nothing of Torah or Bible or Qur'an or any other portentous distortion of the universe; say hello to the rightness of the myriad indifferent phenomena as they swirl about you and are you every moment undisguised.

          --Mr. Smolin, 2/11/08