Category: kindness

covid shots

Posted on by empty williams

Holy, did that shit ever hit me this time. It was fine on Hallowe’en night when I got it, but the next morning, my arm started to hurt worse and worse. It crawled up my neck and by about eight in the morning, I felt like I’d been run over a bus.

It wore off by about three, but still. Brutal. Longest work day ever.

Oh, and before everyone gets all crazy with conspiracy theories and whatever, I don’t get the shots because of some idealism or virtue signalling or because I’m a sheep.

I just don’t want COVID, that’s it. I don’t want to carry COVID to anyone else. That’s all.

It’s nothing more than that. Getting COVID is worse than any temporary aftereffects of the shot and if I were to be responsible for someone dying because I couldn’t be bothered to take care of myself, I’d feel horribly guilty.

I don’t want that.

So take your conspiracy nonsense and your right wing bullshit rhetoric and shove it up your ass. This is just basic logic. There’s a disease out there that can negatively impact me and the people around me. Getting a simple vaccine will help prevent that.

That’s the logic. That’s it. People being good to each other and to themselves is just straight logic. It’s nothing more than that. That’s what all you crazy Trump-loving Republicans have forgotten: cruelty is not the point.

Common sense dictates that people treating each other with respect and kindness benefits everyone; being a selfish dick does not.

That’s the entire thing, right there. And if you’d persecute me for that, all you’re doing is showing your own irrationality, which should make you question whether or not you’re really the great, intelligent thinker you think you are, since you can’t comprehend the absolutely obvious logic of that.

It won’t, of course, because of the whole selfish, irrational thing, but that’s your cross to bear, not mine. Willful blindness is a curse inflicted on the stupid, or the smart who refuse to step outside the boundaries of their self-made prisons.

Target: 1600 words
Written: 1681 words, novel: Father Lightning

reconciliation

Posted on by empty williams

Everything I read and hear about residential schools makes me sadder and less proud to be Canadian.

Of course, there are plenty of good things about being Canadian (not being American being one of them), but this is deeply, deeply disgraceful.

It makes me ashamed to be a part of it, even if I was never directly a part of it.

I suppose I will continue to root for kindness and individualism as my favourite types of humanity, and try, at the very least, not to get involved with that kind of monstrosity, and oppose it wherever I’m able.

Target: 1600 words
Written: 1335 words, Father Lightning

needing to move on

Posted on by empty williams

It’s funny – I used to think when I took on a project, I’d take its theme to heart almost immediately and be like, look at me! I know how to think and behave!

But that’s never the way it works out. I didn’t gain immediate freedom from trauma and life’s various aggressions from The Mungk; I’m not gaining the intimate knowledge of kindness from Father Lightning.

I have understood how hard life can beat you down since I finished The Mungk.

That gives hope that maybe when Father Lightning is done, the transition to a man of kindness and understanding as a logical way of life will be complete.

Of course, it’s all work.

And progress need be made before it can be said to be true.

Nothing is given; everything is earned.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 1523 words, novel: Father Lightning

labour day

Posted on by empty williams

I used to really dislike unions. Perhaps it was the poor experience with the automotive unions my dad had to face off with, or maybe because I read too much Ayn Rand as a teenager (I’m past it now, thankfully – with caveats. The Republicans that love her definitely twist the shit out of what she preached. Her problem was getting too caught up in capitalism and forgetting we live in a symbiotic system, in which we cannot separate ourselves from the things with which we connect. To exist solely for oneself in such a system ends up causing behaviour similar to a parasite or cancer. That said, there’s much to be said for creatives and independents, as well as government overreach).

In any case, I’m much more fond of them now, though they, like any institution where money or power is involved, are prone to corruption. Still, I would rather favour those who have little than those who have more than enough.

So, happy Labour Day, and long live the unity of the underclass.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 992 words, novel: Father Lightning

long weekend

Posted on by empty williams

And we’re only halfway through. What I wouldn’t give for peace.

Someday, I pray I’m proven to be wrong, and there is a heaven, and it’s just an opportunity to do and learn all things you never got a chance to during your life. Every bit of knowledge learned.

Who shot JFK? Were aliens actually here? Who really controls the world?

And the scariest of all: what did people actually think of me?

Plus, you know, doing all the things you wanted to try: travelling to every part of the world, kayaking the Colorado, trekking the Amazon, finding out if Patrick Stewart is really as cool as he seems. Seeing if Helen of Troy or Cleopatra live up to the hype. Is Rasputin’s dick really pickled somewhere? Was kindness really all it was cracked up to be?

You know, stuff like that.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 1969 words, novel: Father Lightning

tender

Posted on by empty williams

It’s not been a bad week, just a busy one. Every note is tender. Every nerve as well.

It’s times like these that we need to remember kindness.

Being nice to the people around you, and to yourself, when everything is going off the rails?

It’s a salve, not a stopgap.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 729 words, novel: Father Lightning

forward movement

Posted on by empty williams

I think The Mungk really fucked me up. I always think each book will teach me a little something, to give me time to explore a subject and really think it through.

The Mungk was about trauma, big and small, and how it can utterly destroy a person if they don’t work through it, and just keep repeating the same behaviour in various forms over and over. There’s a mindlessness to it, a lack of introspection that works (in my opinion) to really show how completely derailed life can be by allowing trauma to drive the train.

Father Lightning was meant to provide the opposite, an exploration of kindness in the face of bad shit, and while it’s doing that, it’s not here.

I meant to write about it in these pages, but instead, I’m just telling you how much life sucks, little snippets to say I wrote something that day.

That’s changing.

I am going to make more of an effort in this blog to really document how things are going. The Mungk may have destroyed lives in its blind fatalism; Father Lightning will serve as a way out. A glimmer of hope. A path forward.

Then again, no one’s ever truly reviewed the books I’ve written, so yeah.

They could be piles of shit.

Killing the ego is everything; denying all value is not.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 1427 words, novel: Father Lightning

hallelujah

Posted on by empty williams

Friday, Friday. Girls are working tomorrow so it might almost be a relaxing day.

I doubt it though. I am not a lucky man, and I do prefer to remind myself of that fact.

Of course, I do it with kindness, because you know, maybe it’ll reverse the jinx if I don’t overassume good things will happen to me.

Assumptions of goodwill can be a virus, especially if you haven’t earned it.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 1479 words, novel: Father Lightning

sad times

Posted on by empty williams

Too many lately. Death after death, tragedy after tragedy.

The pandemic brought everything to a grinding halt; coming out of it has felt like being thrown into a meat grinder.

I thought I was down during The Mungk; daily meditations on trauma and fatalism being a big part of that. Thinking about kindness has only caused me to realize how small a part of the world it’s become.

I blame Trump, Putin and all the other right wing motherfuckers; propagating constant lies amidst a firehose of misinformation, killing rational thought and reasonable behaviour in a fiery torment of unreal anger and radicalization.

I think I’m going to have to start looking harder. Either that or go it alone. Hell, it worked for Jesus, didn’t it?

Wait. Did it?

Okay, Ghandi maybe. Wait. Him too?

Martin Luther King? John Lennon?

Jesus, being kind is a violent racket.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 2642 words, novel: Father Lightning

end of july

Posted on by empty williams

Summer’s leaving so fast. The heat, the wildfires, the desperate downward spiral.

It has been one to remember.

I see how the world goes and can’t help but wonder. Am I a twig in face of a tsunami?

Using kindness as a block, in a way that could never hold back the tide.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I have ideas on top of ideas.

I’m not sure the world will let us survive long enough to see them through.

I’m not sure I’ll make it.

None of us do, in the end. If we’re lucky, our works will outlast us. The question is, with climate change, the rise of right wing nuttery and increasing division and stupidity, will the world outlast any of us, let alone the things we create?

I’m building a world on kindness. Increasingly, I find the world wants nothing to do with it.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 2405 words, novel: Father Lightning