Kern Carter's Blog, page 39
June 1, 2022
The Masquerade
Courtesy of Matthis Elle and UnsplashFor the lovers of excess, the event was a treasure trove filled to the brim with temptations. They came to the party in full regalia, costumed in such a way that their true selves were expertly tucked away, never to be glimpsed by the other partygoers, they were beautifully anonymous, and as such, they could put their ugliness on full display. Behind the masks designed to hide their identities, their true selves peeked out, a malicious gleam in untrustworthy eyes, an unhealthy sparkle that belied the evil in their hearts.
Here debauchery was accepted and the more gluttonous your wants, the more accepted you were. In this place, the women offered their skin much like a shopkeeper offered their wares, priced reasonably. Indeed, there was something for every budget. The men, not to be outdone, made themselves as easily bought, parading their bare flesh like cattle in an auction. Everything was for sale, nothing forbidden while the masks were on.
Some of the party-goers had even seen fit to bring their unfortunate offspring along, offerings for the more curiously bent leanings, although the price tags were a bit higher, think specialty items. Even though the masks were able to keep hidden their identities the desperation and desire to be invisible were impossible to mistake and made each of them seem similar to the next. Still, the party raged on.
Come Monday, these same people would be seen sans masks, on the streets, in their so-called real lives, with no evidence of the identity of their secret selves. Even in their minds, that other self that dwelled within them was a secret, something they could have told you they knew nothing about, and they would have been telling the truth. Such is the way of men and women with unnatural desires and black hearts.
At midnight, the crowd becomes frenzied, a huge undulating wave of intermingling bodies writhing against each other, moans of pleasure and frustration blending to make calliope music for a mad circus. The party-goers become frantic as the time to recede into society draws near.
When their dance has reached its eerie climax and ebbed down into a gently rolling mass of sweaty flesh and protruding limbs, the attendees know the time is at hand, and depart back into the world they briefly escaped from, where they will wait until it's time to wear their masks again.
[image error]The Masquerade was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
May 31, 2022
Trust No One
Photo courtesy of Megs Harrison and UnsplashIt’s a phrase filled with drama and ominous undertones. Isn’t it? A good movie title, perhaps. But is it bad advice? I see some people that are so open and naive they make me cringe, and I just have to look away. It’s like having a premonition of a devastating crash right before it happens. Then other people think there is subtext or hidden machinations in every little thing, no matter how innocuous that thing may be. Both extremes work my nerves….and my patience.
I like to think that I am safely cynical, but even with that touch of cynicism, I have found myself on the receiving end of someone’s ill-intentioned deception on more than one occasion. I think even the most suspicious, cynical person in the world is at risk of the same; it’s just a matter of telling the right lie. Because no matter who you are there’s always that one thing that will make you open up and want to believe, even if deep down inside, you know better.
Luckily, for most of us, that one thing isn’t something that your average person is just going to pull out of thin air, and can only be discerned by getting to know you, and by then, if you’re lucky, you’ll have already figured out that the person in question is an untrustworthy soul, and will have urged them to be on their merry way.
For the not-so-fortunate, every so often one of those devious types gets past the barriers and when that happens the damage created by their deceit is tenfold. Take a person who is heavily armored against that type of intrusion in their life and watch them discover that they’ve been wrong about a person, and you’ll see that their wrong decision about a person rocks their foundation. Everything that’s been a solid truth in their life goes back to being a maybe in the gray area.
Me, I trust a little bit, with the option to take that back at any time, subject to how I'm feeling at the moment. I trust nothing and nobody absolutely, maybe not even myself. The only thing I can say I trust is that there is no one out there you can trust in absolutely. Least of all yourself.
[image error]Trust No One was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Modern Ape
Photo by Jacob MillsI step down from the raised floorboards onto the red earth, another step takes me out of the lounge and into the pouring rain. The tin roof and three tin walls are protecting me from the storm and it’s electrifying to be out in it. The fourth, eastern wall is completely open, it was never built. But out here the wind rarely blows from the east. The aspect perfectly cuts off the powerful southerlies and the hot dusty northerlies, while allowing the sunrise to light my bed after the dawn birdsong has awoken me.
My home is ‘crude’ by ‘someone’s’ standards. But as I sip my coffee and look through the Myall trees and over the saltbush, watching a family of kangaroos pass by, I recognise my privilege and that of the privileged, I am lucky. And I am happy.
This is now, I didn’t always feel this way. Growing up on food from our garden and paddocks and having the endless fun of life out bush had a dark side. It isolated me socially and made me uncomfortable when the town kids showed off their PlayStations and tuck-shop lunches. I felt like I was an outsider when I went to town, and, in a way, I was. Society was showing twelve-year-old me that TV dinners and video games were coveted and that what I had known was bizarre. Then during my adolescence, nice clothes and loud cars were what was desired.
Once I started to make some money I tried to fill those insecurities. Five-star hotels, nice clothes, expensive dinners, and big TVs. I used to drive a spacious car with chrome everywhere. I used to wax my chest and my back. I was lost in a pretentious, material world. I got fat. My skin was bad. I was so uncomfortable and becoming miserable.
My stunted emotional capacity couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so I partied harder and bought more shit to impress more strangers. I was opulent, obnoxious, and overdosed. But I knew that something wasn’t right and I’m glad I didn’t buy too hard into that world. I was healthy (pretty much), with no debts, and no addictions. When I changed direction, from an industrial electrician to environmental science student, I was doing something conceptually new to me — I’d acted on my intuition.
I was told by the footy club president that I wouldn’t get the grades. I was told I’d miss the money. I was told by an academic that I was finally doing something hard. Dickheads everywhere, pushing society's agenda on me. But it wasn’t about the grades, even though I got them. It wasn’t about the money; I’ve never missed it, and still don’t. It wasn’t about gaining status. It was about interest, my interest. It was about listening to my inner cues and getting to know myself.
When I didn’t know myself, I worked jobs that weren’t rewarding, I did things that I regret, and I was material because there was nothing else to know, I was shallow. I got into toxic relationships because I chased material ideals both professionally and romantically. Once I started paying attention, these toxicities were my catalyst for myself.
Learning to pay attention to what was going on inside has been my most fulfilling experience. I created a depth to be able to swim in my emotions. I discovered my ego, and I work at humbling it despite its little victories. I found my power in adversity. I found empathy. I found the ability to sonder. I accepted my flaws and in doing so accepted everyone else’s. I wrote cheesy essays and I didn’t care. I walked back into my wrongs. I discovered, actually, rediscovered what I’d long forgotten, what was meaningful to me, and what recharged me. Primacy.
To stare into a fire. To be naked on a mountain top. To make love. To fuck. To hunt. To create with my hands. To cry. To meditate on the birds. To feel the bark of a tree like a lover’s waist and watch the emerald sunlight through the leaves. To rise and rest by the sun. To reciprocate with people that want the best for me. To take a step from my lounge into the rain.
What I had experienced as an emotional sleepwalker during my late teens and early twenties was what is known as the ‘extinction of experience.’ This process is a product of our modern world and we get sucked into it in all sorts of casual, insidious ways. It is the cultural forgetting of our basic psychological needs, of our animalism.
We need to sit by a fire because it has kept us alive and we have been staring into one every night for hundreds of thousands of years. We need to physically create because it has been our expression and innovation for millennia. We need to have sex because, more than anything else, it is our drive to continue. Our sociality goes back through our pre-human ancestors. These things are basic and ancient, and they are ingrained in our well-being. But we forget, across our generations and through our ‘developments’, what it means to be apes and this denies our happiness. The experiences that we biologically need to be happy are becoming extinct through simply forgetting. I certainly forgot for a little while.
The coronavirus pandemic revealed to us what a true absence of our primal needs does to our well-being. When we can’t go out and dance, we can’t visit our loves, and we are alone with the prospect of a lonely death hanging over us our well-being plummets. So perhaps now it’s time to find and focus on the primal screams that we can let out.
I feel that as modern apes we can find happiness in our modern world if there is some underlying primacy. Am I stewarding the land, or am I walking past the trash? Am I going to the pub with true friends? Am I going to live for an experience or a post on my socials? Am I going to the office this weekend, or am I going camping? Am I going to watch TV tonight, or am I going to create something? Am I contributing to anything in my community?
I’m not perfect but I now know the values and the life that I’m striving for. And I’ve discovered that three walls in the middle of nowhere will make me happier than four walls anywhere.
Originally published on my personal website (06/12/2020), jacobmills.org
[image error]Modern Ape was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Call For Submissions — What Was Your First Love?
Or if you’re really feeling brave, who was your first love?
I’m not even going to waste too much time with the preamble on this one. We all have love stories and first love stories, in particular. Whether it’s a person or a thing is up to you, but let’s hear it. Tell us about your first love.
Same rules as always:You can submit to this or ANY of our past writing prompts. Just scroll through our previous newsletters. They’ll be marked “Call for Submissions.”If you’re already a writer for CRY, go ahead and submit.Be as creative as you want in your submissions. As long as you stick to the topic, we’ll consider it.Just because you submit doesn’t mean we’ll post. If you haven’t heard back from us in three days, consider that a pass.[image error]Call For Submissions — What Was Your First Love? was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
May 29, 2022
Standing Still
You should never stand still when a child is in motion. Why did you?
May 26, 2022
How Do You Make Changes to Habitual Thoughts to Achieve Happiness?
What I’ve learned from David Ferrers, Mike Dooley, and Abraham-Hicks
Dreamscapes: Ready for Round One?
I have faith in my head. I trust in my dreams. That’s why I love dreaming. I become a different character and I live through a different plotline every single time (almost). I get to be someone I am not in real life.
I have an extravagant social life: close friends, hangouts, and no sense of lingering sadness or loneliness of living. I have an endless sense of freedom. I can always be the hero. The best thing, if I don’t like the dream I can just pull myself from it.
My dreams do mean a lot to me. They make me happy, even if the ending isn’t as great as I’d like it to be. They make me think, even if the thoughts are of how bleak that world must’ve been to the very end.
In the height of a writing slump years ago, and a necessity to write down my dreams for an assignment I never ended up doing, I wrote down a lot of my dreams. Especially the ones I really liked and remembered well. I even kept a notebook in my coffin so I can write immediately after waking from a dream. It’s funny to see how illegible it is.
I wanted to share my dreams with you guys, my dearest readers, because I think there’s a lack of writing about dreams or a lack of writing that seems correct. Movies seem to make dreams less of a surreal experience than they are in my experience. It’s also because I love sharing my dreams and listening to dreams and I think it would be cool to share them with you guys. Who knows, maybe you guys could share back with me.
I call this dream: “Ready for Round One?”
— — —
A traveller from another dimension runs from a mechanical void. His team, a crew of four close friends, one of them being his lover, are all swallowed up and killed by the growing plague. Before she dies, the lover begs him to go and save himself. He runs to our universe.
A bit north of my old elementary school in Masadam-Yae, there is a bridge on which freight trains would pass by, usually in the early morning or late at night. Instead of the usual line, the train takes, while my friends and I are outside, train tracks unravel around us and trap us in a triangle of trains. Then three trains come rushing by at full speed before stopping all at once.
The main train, denoted by nothing other than my thoughts filling me in on the lore, reveals a sign that says Ready for Round One? We, as kids, are confused and scared. The traveller rescues us from the trains, noting his lack of punctuality in saving us.
Throughout the courtyard of my school, we are attacked by different traps and puzzles the evil train set. The most notable is a trap that shot bombs at us. We needed to dodge and plug out the giant plug connected to the actual bomb launcher.
We skip to the train becoming feral. We are stuck inside the school, but the train is screaming and howling outside. One of us, an older sun elf student by the name of Vikashi, urges us to go outside. He was always very outspoken and well reasoned. Essentially a people’s person. We, as kids, decide to listen to him and face the evil train together. After an argument, and a small roasting session directed at the evil train from Vikashi, the train is wildly upset.
It begins to thrash and whip itself at us as if it’s being twirled around by a higher-order power. In the sequence of attempting to dodge the train, I end up separated from the rest of my school. I manage to dodge all the whips the train sends at me. The train then cries out in a deep mechanized scream and mangles. It rebuilds itself into a killer fighter jet that hovers above the school.
I run back to the group because the killer jet begins to shoot at us students. On my own, I’d be a prime target and I’d probably die. I run as quick as I can (ironic because I can’t run well in my dreams) to keep ahead of the fire that the killer jet is letting rain over us.
Two of my friends and I duck into another jet made of dark playground metal with holes it in. The moment we fit inside, a flash of light blinds our eyes. It shows us the demise of the jet and the world being rescued. It also shows us how to operate the jet to allow this fate. Through this, the three of us are given the will and ability to operate the jet.
Using bolts of a near blinding white light, we shoot down the killer jet and end the mechanical plague from taking over our dear Terris and destroying it like it did the traveller’s world.
My faerie friend with her giant wings that weighed her down to the point of not being able to fly, named Savitha, walks home with me. We walk close to the bridge with the train tracks in the deep winter evening sunset. A freight train moving at full speed suddenly stops dead in front of us. The train car in front of us unveils a sign that reads Ready for Round Two?
I awoke from my dreams slightly dazed and a little frightened by the ending. It didn’t teach me much but it was one of the earliest heroic dreams that I still remember to this day. This is a dream that I love and one that I love to share if I could many, many more times because it was a fun experience.
— Heleza
[image error]Dreamscapes: Ready for Round One? was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
