Infidel

I’m sitting here in the student center common area, outside the cafeteria, waiting between classes and feel like commenting on something.
On the other side of the common area there is a Muslim woman I know slightly, we’ll call her Mrs. Hollings. Sitting here I note her head scarf, and am suddenly quite aware of my own head-dress, a baseball cap. The cap has been remade in the style of what soldiers and private-military-contractors call “don’t shoot me” caps, the hard button on top removed and replaced with a tab of Velcro for attaching an IR reflective marker, and with Velcro on the front and across the back for attaching other identifier, or morale, patches. Mine bears morale patches, as I have no need for identification as a ‘friendly”.
One of the morale patches I wear, mounted to the bill of my cap, says Infidel in large capital letters. Mrs. Hollings can’t see it from where she is sitting, but if she could I hope it wouldn’t offend her, but am resigned to the fact that if it did, it would be her problem and not mine. Simply, because, I am an infidel.

Infidel is in the common lexicon today as a word associate with extremist Islam and terrorism. Their justification for killing us is that we are infidels and wish to corrupt their pure and good society with out infidel ways (i.e. not stoning women to death for daring to be raped).
The word has a broader use than just in the context of Islam, but I think everyone’s idea, including my own, of it now is heavily involved with that context more-so than any other.
Context aside, the word means an unbeliever, someone who doubts or rejects the central tenants of a religion.

Now, I am not a man without belief, but I am most certainly a man without religion. I don’t have much use for it, and it separates me from my God more than it connects me. But, my infidelity is not to a religion, or even religion itself. My infidelity is thus:
If you are an enemy of Enlightenment, Spiritual and Intellectual Freedom, the Right of Personal Decision, an enemy of Science, and Medicine, I am your enemy. If you use religion to justify your hatred, and attempts to destroy, those things in which I believe, then I am your Infidel, and proud of it.
If you are not one of those people, if you are not a destroyer, a bonder of people to ideas and decisions not their own, a cruel hand of ancient tyrannies, then we are not enemies and I am not your Infidel. In all likelihood, we share ideals, beliefs, and common goals.

However, there are few things in this world that I am prouder of than being an Enemy, and Infidel, of the destroyers of education and freedom. I wear my marker with pride.

The Craft of Process, Process of Craft

I’m sitting here in my kitchen, amidst the cloying sweet smell of burning elm, and ruminating about creative writing.
When I first began to write creative works, I wasn’t quite one of the “as it is written first is as it must be, to be true” school, but close. I didn’t know any techniques to focus upon anyway, so I just wrote.
As I began to actually study creative writing, and learned technique, it seemed to interfere with me at first. The writing didn’t just flow, if I tried to work technically, and if it doesn’t just flow, it doesn’t work for me.
Today, I noticed something for the first time, the processes of technique, and purpose driven technical refinement, has become a natural part of the flow for me. It’s not just about getting lucky anymore. As with all learning, getting stuck on the knowledge isn’t the way, it is passing through the knowledge to arrive at simplicity (as another great writer once said).

The Real Counter Culture

Are you fighting the man? Do you work to subvert the status quo of big business consumer culture? Is Che Guevara on your t-shirt?
You are not unique. You are not special. You are part of the machine.
Being “counterculture”, being “subversive” is part of the very culture today. Want to burn developments and save rainforests? Some marketing executive has an ad campaign, for an SUV, tailored just for you. Do you dreadlock your hair, never shave your pits (or your bush), and pay good greenback dollars to idolize communist revolutionaries on your clothes? You’re not just a market demographic, you’re such yesterdays news that they teach courses about you to marketers in training - Corporate prints money off you. Refuse to eat meat, and throw pigs blood on beef growers at national agriculture symposiums? McDonalds introduced a veggie burger just for you!
What once was revolutionary, counter to the culture, has been co-opted by that very culture. The movements, the revolutions, didn’t win – They were bought out. The culture made enough appeals to them, the subtle creeping sneaking kind, and they let themselves out to sea, just another part of the great teaming, screaming, mass. Grex Venalum.
The old revolutions are the masks the same old devils wear, while they rape our children. And the old revolutionaries? Those who aren’t wearing the masks are still sewing them. The revolutions are all parts of the machine.
Some of us however, we aren’t that. We aren’t anything.
We work hard, we have personal convictions based on personal search, and are lucky if we ever find a single soul who is like-minded. We don’t need a movement.
We are warriors, doctors, dry cleaners, ditch diggers, software designers, mechanical engineers, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons.
We aren’t pacific, but we are not predators. We simply believe in standing strongly on our own two feet and will do what it takes to do so. Sometimes with glee and zest, simply because we believe in the necessity of it. We carry guns. We love puppies. These are not contradictions. We are well read, well practiced in, can speak intelligently on and apply lessons from, economics, engineering, home-ec., military science, medicine, agriculture, biology, history, chemistry, and philosophy. We know how to love, in the truly deep way that comes from knowing the antithesis there of, and their symbiosis.
Our movement isn’t a cause, and our cause isn’t a movement. We live to live, and we like it this way. We believe in what we can carve out with our own two hands, and everything else we accept because we know, in the end all things come into their own undoing. And we’re waiting for that, because we know we’ll come out on the other side just fine.

The rest of you are just fakes.