Hi. This is the Home of "Are You Feeling Okay?"...

I am destroyed by the madness of repetition. The second-hand tick-tock of my life petulantly slamming down one foot after the other – left, right – like Macbeth’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping forward until the movie ends, the credits roll, the reel flickers in the dim light. Wake up, take a pill. Go to sleep, take a pill. Two wednesday night, two Thursday morning, two Thursday night. Pill for pain, pill for nausea, pill for vomitus, pill for headaches, pill for pills. They tell me to take a pill to counteract the pills that I'm taking. The determined pursuit of relief is the ultimate opiate of the masses.

Democracy comes from two Greek words: demos - the power, kratos - the people. Democracy is the power of the people. To control democracy you must control the power of the people. In order to control the power of the people you must find a way to control their worries. The people worry about living life comfortably or without pain. Life, however, is pain. To control the people's worries then is to control their pain. An offer to relive pain is the way to control the power of the people. You give them relief and they gladly hand over their freedom and liberties.

You tax a man more and more every year and give that money to a multi-billion dollar company, only to force that man to watch that company give it to a few hundred people as bonuses. Meanwhile, the man's factory has shut down and the 8.5% of people who want jobs and are looking for jobs cannot get them. The man changes the channel only to watch a man going to trial who took billions of dollars from thousands of investors (billions divided by thousands is still in the millions by the way) only to enter the court, keep mum, and say he is "truly" sorry for the pain he has caused, though he in no extremity of reality plans to tell these people where their money is so that they may use it. I will ask you: why does this man still love his country? Because his pains in life are eased here more than anywhere else (in his mind). Two tabs of tylenol takes away the back pain. Two pills take away heart disease. Two pills takes away cholesterol. Two nuclear bombs takes away inferiority complexes. I have realized an important thing from studying history throughout college: people will always trade freedom for food and safety.

My back hurts and I walk like a ninety-year-old man who can't find his cane. My knees hurt as if I've played as a catcher in major league baseball for 25 years on my way to the Hall of Fame. My stomach hurts from the creeping, twisted invasion of restrictive cells making extension and flexion more cumbersome a task than Atlas' struggle to hold up the heavens. I grunt and sweat from the pain in the night like a working-girl on a busy Friday night. Sometimes the pain is so numbing my mind goes blank and there is a momentary existence of nothing that takes place between my ears. I'll tell you what: when drugs and avoidance are my only options to escape the pain of my existence, it's about time for you to take me out back and shoot me dead. We might do our work through the easing of the pain of living, but you can hardly call it work if you are self-medicated, either physically, mentally, politically, or otherwise.

Do the time. Make the investment. Embrace your pain. Pain is life, your job is to ease the pain, but if you never experience the pain for what it is, then you similarly never experience life for what it is. It's your choice as to how you handle your life. You can take the handed out help and give up your demos, or you can ease the pain through real life, non-segregated experiences. That's my choice.

Just as I've told my fiancee that I love her so much that I would rather be fighting with her than doing anything else with anyone else, I'd rather experience real life, then coast through it unscathed.

PEACE