The Outcast Becomes The Teacher

Well, it's pretty much over now, the heavy season that revolves around Valentine's day has come and gone. This was my first as an angel and even the expectations and warnings from Archangel Michael didn't really prepare me for what I was in for. It was essentially a constant state of work; after every word of inspiration, there was another subject to run to. Lonliness is not the most challenging problem a person can have, but the steady, unending flow of projects without respite gets a little draining after a while.

Suzanne said something kind of funny, she said, "Well maybe the weekends won't be so bad, cause, like, all the lonely people will siting home by themselves because they have nothing to do."

She's so sweet. Living the kind of life she did, she really has no idea what it's like to be a lonely person. But the great thing is that she so badly wants to learn. So this was actually the first time Suzanne and I teamed up. We went to this bar, and I motioned to where five people were sitting. "What do you see?"

"Four guys and a girl," she said.

I said, "look closer. There's one couple. See those two guys talking? They're friends. Look at the guy in the middle."

She took a look. "The one watching the tv?"

"Yes. By himself. That's the lonely guy"

"OH! Oh."

It felt good to mentor someone in the ways of loneliness, like my years of training had finally become useful. Then, with powers of perception in hand, we went to work.

More to come.

Another Way To Salvation

I'm so not even ready to talk about work, as I'm still recovering from Valentine's Day. So let's talk about a revelation of a different kind. I've always held a disdain for all things safe and conventional. Ordinary is boring, and let's face it, usually the mark of a lack of creativity or originality. Ordinary fuckin' culture. I hate it.

That's why it was so great to stumble across this novella called The Salvation Of Billy Wayne Carter by an author named M. David Hornbuckle. On the surface it's about a musician who rises to legendary status, but it's really about so much more. It's an analysis on the human condition painted with a surreal palette as it jumps through a web of time and characters. Original, sometime challenging (without the self-impressed condescension that comes with forced literary eccentricity) and most definitely not conventional.


Anyway, if you want to read more about it or just plain get your hands on it, you can check it out at:

http://billywaynecarter.com/

You're welcome.

Nothing's Certain But Death And Valentines

I used to wonder if there really was anything to the idea of reincarnation. Not so much because of the idea of extending the soul's tenure in the physical world, more because of the concept of collected karma. The idea that the sum of your actions determining your state of being in the next life always resonated with me, especially my states were especially low. The idea is not so much the state you're born into, but the one that follows you over the course of your life; poor actions translate into poor consequences in the next life. The barbaric run of bad luck I had when I was alive often made me wonder, if this notion is real, exactly how fucking evil was I in my last life to earn the life that I was given? Given the relative privilege of my family background, I think I wasn't a murderer or dictator, but at the very least, I must have been a REAL asshole.

Turns out I'm not alone in that sentiment. See, the angels are in our busy season right now. Valentine's Day is approaching. Think of it like with accountants and Tax day: to us, February 14 is our April 15. Marley is getting signals of despair everywhere she goes. "People wonder what they did to deserve the loneliness they're feeling," she said the other day. "Some of them think about that karma thing too. It's so sad. It's like they're blaming themselves."

I never thought about it like that, but as emotionally dark as I already know New York City to be, the depression booster shot it gets in the high season pushes it beyond anything you'll ever know. A friend of mine once called NYC "loner capital of the world." I didn't know about that, whenever I was alone, I always saw couples paired up and groups of carousers celebrating the invention of the pint glass. That's the immensity, when you're an angel, you realize the loners are EVERYWHERE, milling about being given very little from which to glean joy out of life

As you may have guessed, the constant flood of inspiring reassurance during the high season has been a little emotionally taxing, and my underlying cynicism creeps up from time to time. Just one more week to go. Then maybe I'll go to Ireland for a little while.

The Diametric Employment Rates Of Heaven And Earth

Heaven is about comfort, not spectacle, most people don't know that until they get here. One of the earthbound concerns alleviated by the heavenly existence is the need for money. As an angel, you need to keep that in perspective so you don't forget how important financial health is. They say it's not everything, and it doesn't buy happiness, but the truth is, unless you're living off the land somewhere, it's a necessity. Money is a major source of pain in the vast majority of the world. Few things cause as much individual anxiety and group infighting as money does. You know, musician David Byrne of the Talking Heads once said "I was never in it for the money." Hate to break this to you , you arrogant douchebag, but yes you are. Because it's your job. If you're not in it for the money, fine, give it all back and live destitute on the street. That's exactly the kind of loss of perspective that, as an angel, you need to avoid.

And that's one of the reason's you can't forget what you're doing. It's a shame to say, but in the current state of the economy, the angel business is one of the few industries that's booming. That's probably why I became an angel in the first place; high demand. With so much economic misery, the divine army had to be understaffed. I imagine that if I'd died during the peace and prosperity of 1990's I probably would have never become an angel in the first place. But I didn't, so I did. So in a way, the failed trickle down politics of the Republicans might be the very reason I got the halo. It's a divine miracle; someone not in the upper three percent actually benefited from them. Hallelujah. Much rejoicing.

I know I normally don't get political because that's not the point I'm trying to make. Then again, in these trying times, I see a lot of people losing the hope they've been clinging to. So I'm not here to tell people who to vote for, I just want them to see the big picture. Change takes time. I know that sounds like a cop out cover story that's meant to hide the truth, but this time, it is the truth. Don't believe me? Go back and take a look at the state of the country back in January of 1994. Right, not a very good one. Take a look at what happened soon thereafter. Ok, convinced? Maybe, maybe not. But you have hope now, right? Be honest. Deep down, I think you do.

Burning The Midnight Bridges

One of the many reasons behind my disdain of humanity is the destruction of faith caused when you trust people to know what they're doing instead if intervening, and then find out the hard way they don't. There's a fine line in angeldom; there's a certain degree to which you leave people to find the answers on their own, otherwise they'll never grow as a result of the experience. So at what point do you decide when they're ready to have their epiphany and when they need the push in that direction? Normally it's not an issue because our typical assignments are people at crisis points. But you never know. And if you hesitate, you run the risk of your subject hurting the people around them.

Case in point, there's a man trying to provide for his family, let's call him Reggie. So Reggie works in an office, so it's not an issue of earning overtime for the extra money. What he's doing is putting in extra work in an attempt to get ahead. His hope is to pay dividends down the road by earning promotions and extra money. But in the present, he's missing out on his family. His wife and children miss him and feel his work ethic is only hurting them. But this isn't the reason I had to go to him. The problem is he feels the same way. He's miserable without the people he loves, but feels he needs to reach his goal. When I was first handed the job, I spent some time observing, hoping he'd wise up. Eventually his ten year old daughter came hope with a test score she was proud of, but there was no daddy to share the good news with. When he finally did come home early enough to see her, tired and cranky, he coldly brushed her off, telling her, "Just show me later, ok?" When she started tearing up, I knew it was time to go to work.

I went to his office posing as a freelance temp one night when he was still working at 2 in the morning. With his inhibitions lowered from fatigue, confessed his dilemma. I told him, "You know, a lot of people are so goal oriented that they never stop to think about what they have."

"But you gotta see the big picture," he said. "You don't think about things down the road, you'll never accomplish anything."

"You'll never be happy either," I said. "There's always gonna be another goal: if you're a supervisor, you wanna be a senior supervisor. Then an executive, then a vice-president or whatever, then the next rung and the next. Life just becomes a series of steps, and no matter where you are, you always feel you're in a state of inferiority. But you have a family. Lots of people don't. You don't have to be company president to take joy from that."

He said, "Maybe,"and I pretended to go back to work. I wasn't sure if I got through to him, but the next night, he left at seven o'clock. It's a start.

Hope Is The New Forty

It's disturbing to think about it this way, but death is a way of achieving immortality. Existence on the physical plain is short compared to that on the ethereal plain. It's not just a sad notion, it's an exploited one. Most religions are built on a foundation of this belief, it's their way of controlling minds by playing into the fears of aging and death: follow our ways and and you'll exist forever. But it's sad, using this as a guiding belief simply misses the point. The whole purpose of life is challenge and the rewards you reap when they're faced. Death is just comfort; it's not the reward that comes at the end of life, it's the consolation.

Unfortunately, life compresses a wealth of pressures into its short span and comes prepackaged with a set of goals. This is why the fear of aging is so pronounced. It wouldn't be an issue if so many people didn't see time passage as an obstacle. Take this job I had the other day. The new year is only a few days old, and this guy, we'll call him Stan, acted like his life was over as soon as that ball in Times Square landed. After I got to know him and asked why, he said, "I'm gonna be forty this year."

"When?" I asked.

"April."

"Hey, forty's no big deal! And if it were, you still have a few months."

"Yeah," he said, "but whenever the new year starts, I already feel the age that I'm gonna turn that year."

"Oh. Well, I know, it's like, you reach a certain age and you're disappointed you haven't accomplished what you wanted to."

"Well, kind of. It's more like, well you know, all those statistics they have, that say if you haven't gotten those things by a certain age, you never will."

That kind of threw me a little. As bitter as I was about my life, I never had to deal with that. Forty was about a decade away when I died. When Shannon left, I was focused on life without her, not the possibility of life without anyone.

"They can play with statistics all they want," I said. "But your fate isn't based on some kind of sabermetrics book, life isn't a formula. You want to life life by odds, fine. But you know, odds don't control you, you do. Don't let some statistic tell you what you can or can't have. If you just gave in to that, then what's the point of life anyway?"

"Good point," he said.

So, I didn't solve his problem; the guy's still gonna turn forty. But I could tell I gave him hope. And we're not problem solvers, we're angels.

We'll Take A Cup Of Kindness Yet For Lives Gone By

It's almost New Year's Eve. New Year's doesn't really mean much to me anymore, least not the way it used to. When I was young, New Year's always meant new beginnings. The older I got, the more it came to define the passage of time, the concrete indicator that there was less sand in the hourglass and the chance of eking out a shred of happiness and create an actual meaning to my life was getting slimmer and slimmer.

This is no longer an issue now that I'm dead and becoming an angel has given me the opportunity to make something of myself. So what should this new year mean to me? Well, it's the first year I'll start off dead and the first full one in the kingdom of Heaven. And this new year won't be the usual reminder that the end is coming 'cause my end already came. Then again, it's just the end as I used to define it, because I found out the hard way this year that death was only the beginning. I guess that's what this year is: the ultimate new beginning, the first year that never knew me as anything less than an angel.

But the other important thing is that this is also a new decade. When I went back and looked at all the events leading up to my death; all the abandonment, breakups and misery that lead me to all the bitterness I entered Heaven with, I realized that the vast majority of it happened over this last decade. Boy, what a fucking horrorshow that was. Getting hit by that car seems like the least of my troubles compared to all that crap.

So, instead of being sad that a whole decade has gone by, I'm just happy to see it go. Does that mean I'm glad I'm dead? That's a really tough question. I'm much happier that I was when I was alive; at least right before I died. I mean, you're supposed to be happy, you're in fucking Heaven for fuck's sake. But it's not just all the superficial joy stuff here, like the apartment, the Tagalong cookies and Disney World, it's people in my existence now that make it all really worth it. If I could have had that on Earth without getting a piece of my head ripped off, I think that's the route I'd have rather gone. But I didn't, and I'm fucking dead, so there we are. At least it all worked out in a way I can live with (so to speak).

Goodbye 00s, fuck you very much, and thanks for everything.

Happy New Year everyone.