Au Revoir, For Now

It's quite clear to me that the way Google has "fixed" blogger, their intention is to do away with the feature altogether. That would be typical corporate methodology, to attract people with "people friendly" services and then slowly do away with them!

I'm not certain now whether I'll create a new blog on Wordpress, or just devote myself to other work. I guess time will tell.

Thank you all very much for reading the hundreds of posts here, some of which later found there way into my books. It's been a pleasure.

Brent

Mental Restorations

Let’s get real: I’m sitting in my apartment on a beautiful day in Hilo. It’s sunny and there’s a fall chill in there air here on the ocean. I wanted to go out, but my auto-immune disease is acting up again, so I have to treat my skin, which is laborious, and depressing.

This damned illness has diminished my life for 15 years, and along with a minor heart attack, bleeding ulcers, sleep apnea, chronic sinusitis major depression, osteoporosis from taking prednisone, and other conditions, left me unable to work.

This host of problems is common with auto immune illnesses. They can’t be cured, are still little understood, and in my case only somewhat treatable. Maybe the worst of it is, I don’t appear that sick so I’m afraid people think I’m goldbricking, as I’ve had to bow out of life and retreat to this goddamned room.

From poverty and boredom, I started writing fiction on those days I was well enough and that’s helped - at least with sense of purpose - but it’s made no money at all after publishing costs, and it hasn’t gotten me out and engaged with life.

With the death of my wife, Lauren, on the 31st of July, I reached an impasse. I had to face the decision of whether to live or die, of whether there remains anything worth living for.

Yesterday, I went with a new friend, Micha, to take some needed items to a veteran living down in Kalapana, and when I got home, I came to a banal sort of epiphany. That is that I had to make the decision to live or die and get on with it.

Because I have a daughter I love very much, and my wife wanted me to live in order to be there for her, I made the decision to live; though my spirit would prefer to be where Lauren is, and I feel crushed and disoriented without her.

I don’t mean to imply that it was an easy decision, or to make light of the struggle with life! Not mine or anyone else’s. I know full well how hard it is to go on when faced with certain aspects of reality, and how the inevitability of our own mortality can cast everything in a futile light.

In my opinion those who condemn others for suicide need to walk in that other person’s shoes, and that isn’t possible. Yet I know that for myself, refusing to face the decision would be worse than either choice. Life would become nothing but ongoing anxiety and depression.

So. I’ve decided to live and to get involved (to the degree that I'm able) with the non-profit Micha is founding, called Mental Restorations.

The aim of this nonprofit is to restore boats and create a farm, so that veterans and first responders (as well as others in crisis) can have an opportunity to fish, scuba dive, garden, get away from the routine of their lives, and restore some sanity and optimism. Of equal importance, the goal is to provide a platform for peer-counseling among the community of those involved.

I can think of no more worthy aspiration.

So from creative writing, I’m going to change my focus for awhile to grant writing, peer-counseling, and whatever else I find that I can do to help this venture get off the ground. I’ve done this kind of thing before. In the early 90s my wife and I spent 7 years reviving a food coop in Marquette Michigan that was closing and put it on a sound financial footing. The last I heard it had 8,000 members, 80 employees, and was doing about 13 million in sales annually.

So here we go! It seems I was destined for poverty and these utopian adventures! Well, it may not empower my life, at least financially, but it beats brooding, alcoholism, or suicide! So here’s to the next quixotic adventure!

Brent Hightower

The Heir Apparent

With The Heir Apparent, I've completed the five books I've been working on since 1999. They are all available on Amazon, and digital versions sell for $2.99, on Amazon Kindle. I'm also running a brief promotion on some of the ebooks. These will be listed briefly at $0.99.

For various reasons then I'm now going to take a break from writing. How long, I don't know. Much depends on the level of interest in these finished works. I will keep this blog and my Amazon writer's page active, until I have some clear vision of what comes next in life.

I think that with 27,000 hits Riding on the Storm has been a success for a blog of this type.
Thank you all for making it so,

Brent

The Future

I don’t know at the moment how much I’ll be contributing to this blog in the future. One reason is that if Biden loses the upcoming election, I won’t see a point in contributing essays, or social commentary, anymore. When I was young there were a lot of us who thought we could change the world for the better. Now the question is whether we can hang on to some sort of recognizable civilization at all. If Trump wins we are done for, and there will be no reason to chronicle the inevitable decline and fall.

A storm of feeling is coming over me these days. I’m struggling to comprehend those feelings and get honest with them, in order to put them down. That’s always the difficult thing about writing, but at the moment it’s more so, through the sheer intensity of them all.

I am going through one of those moments that are life changing. My beloved wife died not two months ago, and right now, today, I’m completing the last of five books I’ve been working on for twenty years. The sign posts could not be more obvious.

Not only do I not know if I’ll be contributing to this blog in the future, I don’t know if I even have a future. The loss of Lauren is devastating, and I’ve put my remaining strength into these books, while writing, as an occupation, seems to now belong to a handful of corporate owned products, like Michael Creighton, and Danielle Steele.

Meanwhile, I struggle with a serious auto immune disease and other health problems, planetary extinction is off the charts, the ecosystem nears collapse. The world I’ve known and cared about seems to be dying. Whether there is a purpose for me in it, I don’t yet know.

Thanks,

Brent

My collection of poems, published digitally on Kindle

I published my collection of poems today, digitally, through Amazon Kindle. I don't particularly like publishing poems digitally, because I care about the whole esthetic experience of reading poetry. Yet it seems people read more books digitally now, because the price is right. In this case just $2.99. They should be available on Amazon within a few days. I can't link to Amazon here, so please go to Amazon.com and enter "Brent Hightower." These are not your grandmother's poems. If you don't want to read work that comes from the current world they may not be for you.

Thanks.

P.S. Along with my poems I finally managed to reedit my novel, Ode To Belladonna, which I now feel as proud of as The Broken World. Mali Dahl also helped me tremendously by reediting my collection of essays, Inner Demons. Both are also available on Amazon. My new novel, The Heir Apparent, will be coming out this autumn.

Goodbye, My Love

My wife, Lauren, died on the 31st of July. I’m going through our house, rearranging things, throwing things out and putting things away, partly because whenever I see something of hers it brings up a host of memories that are overwealmingly painful . Of course I want to save many of her things. I’m putting many of them away in boxes, for a time I’ll be strong enough to endure seeing them again, and maybe even enjoy those memories.

As I look at each thing it takes me on a journey back down the years. And now, it makes me more than want to cry. It makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. I feel myself falling into a hole that goes down forever into darkness, and I’m too weary to even feel.
I don’t know why I feel the need to say these things. Everyone knows, everyone can imagine death and what it means. Why this need to unburden myself, by laying some part of this burden on someone else. It seems another cruel thing about death, this way that misery has of wanting company.

I have no answers for any of this, but only look forward to a time when every nuance of the past doesn’t bring with it some subtly different shade of pain.
Yet I also feel her spirit here, in this room, and I feel her benevolence, her kind energy, and that she doesn’t want me to grieve. Goodbye my Lauren, my wife, my life.

Brent Hightower

The Future of the Democratic Party

Before I post this I'll preface it by saying, "Yes, I'm voting for Biden!" Even though I strongly backed Sanders in the primary, I'm voting for Biden!

Assuming Democrats win the election, there will be two ways of thinking about how to go forward. One will be for Democrats to take the political center, and in so doing marginalize the Republican party as a fringe group, thus becoming the party of the majority.

The alternative will be to combat the radical right-wing agenda of the modern Republicans with an alternative vision, one that actively seeks to heal the deep inequities in American society through activist policies.

On the surface the first vision seems logical, but upon further scrutiny it falls apart altogether. The election of Trump itself is an indication of how profoundly disaffected Americans are with the status quo! If the Democrats become, by placing themselves in the center, apologists for the way things are, they will face swift political annihilation.

Our situation is very similar to that which Roosevelt faced in 1932. We should take his actions as the perfect model for how we face the current situation. Democrats must do nothing less then completely reverse the prevailing attitudes of the last 40 years. Only if Americans see a significant change in their personal fortunes, and the conditions of their communities, will Democrats prevail, even in the short run. If Democrats don't prevail we will likely face some new form of fascism.

The Sea in Storm

In the indefinite light of evening,
Signals flash from out along the bay,
Seemingly as distant as a waking dream,
And the long, low, face of the sea
Reaches for aye into the ebbing gleam,
As if this sea were time itself, and life,
And the waning sun their sheer uncertainty.

These beacons telegraph in short bursts,
Green, then red, then green again,
And are so emblematic of life itself to me,
The two colors dispersed in oncoming night
Communicate their lack of all conviction.
As if in life's storm they are uncertain,
And I, likewise, cannot find my way.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

The Meaning Of It All

I’m with my wife, Lauren, tonight, and she’s slowly dying. She had cancer and the result of the radiation treatment was that it killed too much tissue, so she’s dying. She’s delirious most of the time, and in great pain, although I’m able now to treat that pretty effectively. But I’m not going to talk about that, at least not directly. I’m going to talk (probably in a somewhat rambling fashion) about some of the thoughts that have gone through my mind tonight.

You might think that mortality would bring people together, through its very finality. Because we're here only a short time, you’d think we'd learn to appreciate one another (and certainly there is an element of that in death and dying.) Many people selflessly dedicate their lives to easing pain and providing comfort, and people certainly do offer sympathy when there’s death and dying in a family.

But in the larger sense, even mortality isn’t enough to get us to let our guards down, to allow us to trust our fellow man, and this is something we should ponder very seriously, for its implications.

It has to do with the nature of this existence. Every creature on earth (and we are not exceptions), is forced to the struggle to survive, and this inevitably makes us all natural antagonists. That is the reason we don’t let our guards down.

Love leaves us vulnerable to those who do not feel love, and there are many who, for various reasons, mainly genetic, do not feel love. The rest of us know this, but mostly on a subliminal level, because to allow ourselves the conscious knowledge of it is simply too psychically damaging.

These are the predators among us, and those capable of feeling love spend much of their lives, much of their psychic energy, on fabricating excuses for them, while those who don’t feel love become the dominators.

My wife's life has been defined by her struggle to understand, and attempt to articulate, this seemingly simple and yet terribly complex and hidden aspect of human nature. It is the aspect of our natures that leaves humanity so hopelessly incapable of establishing lasting harmony, in either families or society itself.

These predators often rule over others, and do so ruthlessly, because they generally have the most drive to attain power, and the descent, loving, caring human beings, who suffer at their hands often spend their life's energy making excuses for them, because the full realization that someone close to us is such a being, is often too terrible to endure.

Many of humanities seemingly endless problems stem from this one failing, not so much of our making (not even the predators, who generally didn't choose to be that way) as that of this existence itself. It's easy to see, in that context, that these people are to be pitied. Yet to do so is dangerous.

Religion, democracy, law and a hundred other human social mechanisms exist, simply as an attempt to mitigate against this human failing.

I write this now simply because of the nature of our times, and out of what I see as the meaning of our lives - those of myself, my wife, and daughter. We have struggled, in our relatively insignificant way, to bring this truth to light.

In historical terms, and in those of larger human society, this dilemma can be grasp maybe most easily in the rise of Hitler, and in the appeasement of him by Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain, the ultra-civilized man, simply couldn’t believe that Hitler wanted another war, after the recent, horrible, and pointless bloodletting of World War I. Chamberlain, the ultra-civilized man, simply didn’t understand the nature of people like Hitler.

If humanity is to survive and rediscover a life worth living in modern times, it will only be when the majority (and yes, I do believe the feeling human beings are in the majority!) come to see this clearly, and never let it out of their consciousness again.

Yes, sadly some of us are wolves, nay hyenas, for wolves are social animals; and the rest of us had better learn, no matter how much it goes against our innately peaceable natures, to never again be sheep. . .

Yet I sincerely believe that our spirit’s are pointed towards someplace higher, and so for myself, and my family, and ultimately for us all, I have hope. For reasons we don't understand we live in a violent, transitory world. One in which we're allowed to glimpse the higher reality of love and truth, albeit through a veil of suffering. I don’t believe that glimpse is for nothing.

I write this tonight to honor my wife, Lauren, that most unusual of people in modern times, a philosopher. She has not showed even one hint of fear in the face of death. It’s the living that time and again, her heart goes out to.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

A Brief Personal Note

I'm going to do something a bit unusual for me here, and that's to just write down some brief thoughts about my life, my work, and the nature of our times.

In the last several years I've become aware that my writing's taken a darker tone. This isn't something I've done consciously. As a writer (or at least as one who does the kind of writing I'm interested in) one can only work with what comes from the spirit. There's simply no point otherwise, because nothing else can illuminate the things that matter.

If then one stays true to the spirit, their work inevitably reflects the times and conditions of their life, and these are dark times for me personally, and for America as a whole.

Yet I don't believe it follows that such writing is negative. What it is, is challenging. In order to overcome dark times, I believe, we must confront them and try to understand why they are what they are, for that's the only process that can free us.

Retreating into fantasies of a happier past, where it's forever 1958 (the approach too many Americans have taken recently to address current problems) is to disarm in the face of danger. Above all, I think, trying times demand courage. So in my new novel and my poetry I've chosen not to retreat, but rather to dive into the wreck and see what may be discovered there, be it skeletons or sunken treasure.

I hope that you, my potential readers, will likewise choose not to shy away from the psychic challenge of our times, and in keeping with that outlook, will be willing to read my work.

Brent Hightower
Copyright Brent Hightower 2020
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com