NOTE: This essay is adapted from some experimental fiction I've been kicking around. No point in reccing this, it doesn't belong on the front page. But if you enjoy it (or if you don't) let me know in the comments. As always, thanks to anyone who takes the time.

Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy on my soul

“All ya gotta do is not kill yourself,” he said, “everything else is negotiable.”

I looked at him and thought, what a peculiar thing to say. But upon reflection, I realized he had a point. You could do a whole lot worse in this life than to still be living. At least I had that going for me. I wasn't dead yet.

Perched on the top bunk of our cramped nine-by-six two-man cell, back against the hyper-solid concrete wall, I looked down at Cracker Jack's wizened form. He perched on the bottom bunk closer to the front of the cell, withered legs crossed, sheathed in prison issue denim, looking back up at me through coke-bottle glasses, smacking his toothless gums and puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette.

“I reckon you got a point there, Cracker,” I said. “Suicide's one thing I haven't tried. Though I can't say I haven't thought about it.”

“Everybody thinks about it.”

“You suppose?”

“Ain't no doubt in my mind. Everyone I ever known has been one step away from it. They live only because they have, so far, fought off the desire to end it all. It's almost like they think if they can hang on a little longer, things'll finally turn in their favor.”

“That ain't a bad way to think is it?”

“Not if you think human suffering is okay.”

“Come again?”

Cracker Jack stood up, did a little shimmy stretch to loosen his bones and turned to the door. Looking out on the cell-block catwalk without really seeing it, he grabbed a bar in each hand and paused in deep thought. After a moment, he turned and looked at me with a simple, earnest expression. “Most the folks I know are lower class, poverty-stricken and emotionally broken. Most of 'em come from a long line of broken people. Maybe they can read, maybe they have a trade, maybe they're lucky enough to be white – but on the inside they're a mess. Messed up childhood, crappy schools, no opportunity, grinding poverty in a rich man's world, a shuck-and-jive government with crooked congressmen and lawmen lookin' to get rich - hopelessness, helplessness, despair, prison.

“And while they might not want to hear it, things ain't about to turn around in their favor, no matter how long they hang on, no matter what they do, how many prayers they say, how many times they vote for democrats - no matter what. So by hanging on they are just prolonging they own suffering.”

“You do make it sound inviting.”

“Ain't nothing inviting about it. You know it yourself. Look where we at.”

“Don't you know any happy people?”

“Happy people? In prison?”

“Is everybody you know in prison?”

Cracker Jack thought for a moment, “Yep.”

“That's messed up.”

“What ain't?”

“I guess everybody finds their own reason for living.”

“I reckon so,” Cracker Jack said. “I'm still here. For no good reason I can conjure. I reckon it don't have to be good, just a reason.”

Given his overall outlook, and considering his generally impoverished, deprived and challenged existence, I suppose it was amazing that he was still kicking at all. Some folks just find it hard to give up. Yes, old Cracker Jack was the living embodiment of the suffering masses – he was one of them anyway – one of very many, truth be told.

Cracker Jack and I were cellmates for ninety long-assed days and nights, as we went through the in-processing procedure that the Alabama Board of Corrections called Quarantine. For the majority of those waking hours, for every one of those ninety days, I drank in all Cracker Jack had to say about life - and he was a chatty fellow with only me for an audience. I heard, in elaborate detail, all about the ups and downs of his sixty-odd years of raw human experience that leaned heavily toward the dumb, the sad and the plain unlucky. After three months of consuming the universe according to Cracker Jack, all I could think to say was, “Lord have mercy.”

My own life has been one misery after another. Not that there haven't been good days. Sometimes a quiet moment, outside at night under the stars, say, or a special time between friends or loved ones, can redeem all the rest.

Life is good, people say. They're full of it, if you ask me. I mean sure, that's probably a healthy attitude, accentuate the positive and all that. But to make that claim without an asterisk or disclaimer of any sort strikes me as downright dishonest. Let's face it. Life is a hard dollar.

I suspect that goes for everyone on some level, but maybe not. Maybe life is easy for some, moderately hard for others, the proverbial bitch for the rest and pure hell for the least us. I can only attest to the latter two. This life, as I have come to know it, will scald your hide.

Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy on my soul

Being rich might make a difference. I wouldn't know. I suspect it though. Poverty is suffering. That much I do know. It's a killer. I know that too. These are things rich folks don't understand...I'm pretty sure. Either that or they simply don't mind the suffering of the masses.

Rich people, in my humble opinion, are like colonials, viewing the poor or even those of moderate means as lesser beings, not fully human, who don't feel pain in the same way that one of their own class might. This long practiced view makes it easy for the elite classes to dismiss all others as unimportant, or to hate them as 'the problem.'

I suppose I have been, in one way or another, 'the problem' for most of my life, at least in the eyes of those who defend and support the status quo – which is most people, in my experience. For whatever reasons, be they genetic, psychological or existential, I have been a rebel at least since adolescence. Looking back at the rebellious things I've done, I approve of some of them and not others. I have my regrets. Other people are quick to judge. Some are inclined to like and approve of rebels while others (the majority, I would say) are inclined to condemn those who disobey. We, in our culture, seem to have a proclivity for authoritarianism and conformity...which I have always hated. It seems to me like it's always the rebels who end up pulling us out of the fire.

What is best, what is right or wrong in any given situation can be hard to say. Self-reflection, thinking for oneself and being bold enough to face the existential puzzle of ones own existence in a clear-eyed and honest manner are very difficult challenges to set for oneself. Most people don't bother, or end up taking an easy way out...at the cost of their personal integrity. There are elaborate institutional strategies for avoiding these things altogether. Have faith, swear allegiance, support the troops and don't question important matters too rigorously. Drink the Kool-Aid and go along to get along, say the Pledge of Allegiance and stand when they play the anthem. It's easier than a grand struggle to understand.

Life is a very mixed bag, especially in the modern era – where the obvious insanity of our culture goes unquestioned by most. Our society is dominated and twisted by militarists, propagandists and capitalists who have no vision for the future and no regard for humanity. As long as they get theirs, they couldn't care less about the planet or our species or peace on Earth. Their selfish brand of greedy ignorance has doomed humanity to an ignoble end. It's complicated, pathological and tragic.

At any rate, I have always disliked authority and rarely do as I'm told. It's caused me a lot of grief. Perhaps you can imagine how I feel about the resurgence of fascism.

By the time I got out of prison, many years later, my views had changed considerably from those old days of celling with the consummate philosopher known far and wide (or here and there) as Cracker Jack. All these years later I still think of old Cracker Jack and his outsized impact on how I view my own personal experience. In retrospect it seems almost inevitable that I would come ever closer to full resonance with that old world-weary pessimist. They say life beats the optimist right out of you. I mean it seems like I heard someone say that. Feels true, anyway. It's pretty much my view.

Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy on my soul

I'm coming to the end of a long-assed road. As I approach the end of my life, looking back on it all, I have to say that a more perfectly or more fiendishly designed punishment I could not begin to imagine. Suitable for the sins or crimes of a previous life or lives, I'd like to think, but maybe only for this one. Who knows what mysterious symmetry explains it all - how existence takes such a peculiar shape? Perhaps it's the machinations of the subconscious mind, an inward-looking intelligence operating in secrecy, behind the scenes as it were, making elaborate choices by design, selecting our fate based on God-knows-what, driving us, steering us, making a mockery of free will...or perhaps dancing with it. Who knows?

Here toward the end, I am finding it easier to step outside myself. For most of my life I have been too tightly bound to a mostly egocentric point of view. I recognized that all along but try as I might, I always found it difficult to pull out to a larger perspective. Acid helped. It definitely enlarged my perspective, showed me that more is possible in virtually every realm than previously imagined.

Still, I have been too much concerned with what others thought of me. Being a convict and prisoner instilled in me an unreasonable desire to be somehow welcomed back into 'society' and tricked me into thinking that I had been kicked out of a club. I felt the pain of separation and rejection and somewhere deep inside I longed for redemption, and, I suppose, approval. I once imagined there were people who cared about my suffering and wished for my rehabilitation. I mean there were people like that, family and a few friends but probably fewer than I imagined.

It's a relief to be letting all of that go. I was consumed with meeting some set of expectations or another and worrying about whether my efforts to live a good contributive life would pass muster in the eyes of some mythical 'society.' And now, seeing that society reveal itself as fraudulent and vacuous, even pathological, even though I long suspected it (plastic people, oh baby now, you're such a drag). Nevertheless I now realize that I should have wasted less energy seeking society's approval and just gotten on with my work, my artistic mission, my life. I wasted way too much time trying to fit into what was a flawed and doomed abstraction that amounted to the aggregated insanity of millions of crazy-assed humans, each of them more-or-less as confused and clueless as the next, lost in a mutual hallucination, sharing a reality unmoored from necessity or reason and non-responsive to either.

Probably very few of us ever see ourselves with any degree of objectivity, our own perceptions of our lives, our selves, being the very definition of subjectivity. However much I am able to grasp of my own existence, whatever degree of self-knowledge I have attained, I remain largely a mystery to myself – and that goes for this multi-verse a million fold, a mystery so enormous so daunting so unimaginable that I and we are dwarfed to near absolute insignificance by comparison.

Sometimes I imagine that we pre-select our lives, specifying degree of difficulty or amount of suffering, presumably for some spiritual benefit associated with confronting and overcoming challenges. I have no reason to believe that, but I've heard it speculated here and there and I just sometimes ponder that maybe on some level we self-select all the pain and tragedy. Could it be that we actually choose, perhaps subconsciously, what only seems a chaotic path - possibly to inflict self-punishment for opaque psychological reasons, to atone for the crimes of earlier lives or to temper the spirit in metaphorical fire for esoteric reasons of similar opacity? Whichever it is, whatever it was – so be it.

It's odd to ponder the others one comes into contact with, interacts with, grows to know at some level...or love; be they family, friends or strangers, perfect or otherwise. How little we know ourselves pales by comparison to how little we know any other, even those to whom we are close. Connected, yet we are far apart. Like specks of dust passing in the maelstrom of life, we exchange flashes of recognition, share sympathetic pangs of intuition, catch occasional glimpses of mutual empathy so real they sear themselves into the heart, grow roots into the soul, or, alternatively, slip-slide surely by like so much flotsam in the river of time.

I just looked around and she was gone.

Each of us travel through space/time trapped in our own bodies, and to a greater or lesser degree locked inside our own heads. Watching people come into and out of our lives. We hurtle through life on separate though coexisting tracks. Our meetings in time and space paradoxically both random coincidence and the long continuation of ancient threads of cascading events; actions, and equal and opposite reactions, operating in accordance with timeless laws, spinning through the multi-verse like cosmic carom shots set into motion at the event horizon of creation itself.

As Travis Tritt says, this life is hard to understand.

It's a near perfect mystery, I would say.

Scalded hide or no, there's no denying it's a hell of a ride...though less suffering would be nice.

Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy on us all