band

All around me is dark, but for some light filtering through the light fixture in the suspended ceiling. I wake knowing I should get more sleep, that I’ve only had a few hours rest, but can’t remember why. Then, in quick flashes, the previous night materializes.

The crowd at the bar, the overwhelming noise, the streets I didn’t recognize, the police lights flashing behind me, unable to dial the phone at the station, my parents finally picking me up; violent bursts of memories until I was back, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

Rolling over, I drag my right arm out from under the pillow. Something catches, the hairs on my wrist are pulled and I wince. In the dark, I can’t tell what it is. I flip on the light, squinting against the brightness. The fresh hangover flares and I take a look. A rubber-band is twisted there.

It’s rolled down to my fingers. I open and close my hand, feeling the slight tension. My groggy neurons fumble over one another trying to organize and tell me where it came from. They fail.

I wasn’t wearing it at the night’s onset. I know that. I don’t remember it being there while I ordered drinks. But there it is, resisting my fingers.

I pull it back onto my wrist and stretch for my cell phone. I had called my ex when I was finally home. She was uninterested and understandably upset for being called at such a ridiculous hour.

Then I had called my girlfriend, seeking solace maybe, in a state of drunken idiocy. She was reassuring. I can’t remember what she said, but she was reassuring. Neither call was made on my cell phone. After a glance at it in my hand, I remember why.

The plastic casing is scratched and gouged and dirty and cracked. Where the plastic keypad used to be, there are button-shaped holes down to the metal sensors. They look like a key had been used to try and dial in the buttons’ absence.

In a blink I see what seems like a memory, but with the fog of a dream. I reach down, pick up a few pieces of my phone that litter the sidewalk and keep walking down a street I don’t know in a crooked and halted path.

I shake it off and set the phone back on the table, sitting up slowly. The room wobbles on a far-off axis as I step off the bed. The throb at the back of my head is nothing against the disgust that settles heavy in the pit of my stomach.

The loss of control—the forfeiture of it—makes the bad taste in my mouth worse. Images of what may have happened or could have happened haunt me for weeks afterward.

I ordered a new casing for my cell phone and a new set of buttons. I was back at school within a few days and the memories of the night were already taking on a hint of humor. The disgust started to fade and the events blurred, but the rubber-band remained.

When the original band broke, I replaced it. I went through dozens. A little more than six months after that night, I had my first alcoholic beverage. It tasted terrible.

For some years since, the band reminded me of my complete lack of control. In all other aspects I had always tried to control as much of a situation as possible, but that night I failed on every level. I used it as a crutch and reminder.

I stopped wearing it almost a year ago. It’s been replaced by Her. I imagine the disgust I felt—and still feel in waves and flashes—reflected back at me in Her eyes.

If I lose control again I won’t be able to take care of Her if necessary, be there for Her. My mind swims with reactions She may have. It’s far more powerful than a thin band of elastic.

unbelievable

“Ahmad came, and all of a sudden, we had an angel! This intellectual idea that we were believing in regardless of him, all of a sudden we are like, here is the Arab democrat. See, they exist. Not all Arabs have horns. You know! God sent us this real democrat. And he meant it! He wasn’t lying about his belief in democracy. Here’s proof: Arabs can be democrats.” - Meyrav Wurmser, The Man Who Pushed America to War by Aram Roston

Religious thinker is an oxymoron. Religious thought condemns, slows and sometimes halts progress. Speaking in specifics is worthless. Catholic doctrine has killed millions and left millions more to suffer. Muslim cultures treat women like dogs. Each religion has dozens of faults and only one significant goal: make others believe as you do. Thousands of cultures have been exterminated.

Over the centuries, organized religion has shown an unparalleled ineptitude in the ways of its collective flock. Beliefs that conflict with their central beliefs are ignored and persecuted, but often accepted after finally becoming more popular and eventually irrefutable. The process is arduous and makes any progress stuttered.

The earth is flat, the earth is the center of the universe and all other bodies revolve around it, those of a different skin color are inferior, women contribute nothing to birthing a child but a vessel for its growth and man was born from mud and rib are just a few theories once held by people and were slowly adopted by organized religions. The last is still hotly debated among the ignorant and held to completely by those still dumber than those.

Religion provides a refuge for like-minded thinkers and circular reasoning. The very belief in the intangible leads to irrational rationalization and unrealistic conclusions. The beliefs are strong enough that ignoring contrary evidence is done with nonchalance, a shrug.

The very basis of organized religion is indoctrination. This conflicts, at the very core, with human nature. The tendency to question, the natural curiosity, is hammered down to a mushy pulp by zealots and strong believers. If they were to question themselves, to really listen to what they are saying, many would realize the similarities they have with those they conflict.

In itself, religion is necessary and good. There are many reasons religion was born and many more for why it should remain. There is good within the rank and file of the Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, etc. faiths. Unfortunately, it is clouded by the louder voices of the most extreme believers.

If this were all, there would be nothing to worry about. Purely out of necessity, religion has always been on the fringe of state affairs. It has never been able to interfere at a high level. That’s changing. There are many influential players in the highest ranks of our current establishment that see themselves as the newest players in religious war.

The separation of church and state is ingrained into the fabric of our nation’s birth. It’s losing ground and being overthrown by those that want to use our wealth and power to further the extremist cause. Think tanks and foreign policy advisers and wo/men in great positions of influence are made up of or associating with religious extremists to an alarming degree.

With the thousands of years of evidence pointing to an inflexible establishment being decades behind progress, it’s only a matter of time before our long-held ambitions of progress and enlightened thinking are fundamentally shaken. Foreign policy cannot be created and implemented with ideological ulterior motives.

To think a group of men and women that hold true to Religious doctrine and are steadfast in their beliefs can be flexible and diplomatic enough in the modern age is... well, unbelievable.

passenger

At the light-rail stop, my headphones mute the world around me in favor of the film soundtrack in my iPod. I open the book, and begin reading. It’s quite good and I’m lost in its pages. Something, whether a feeling or a noise I don’t hear or maybe a movement beyond my vision, makes me look up at the street running parallel the tracks.

She’s directly across from me in a car stopped at the light to my right. She’s hanging out the passenger window, her too-light hair pulled back into a ponytail and her tongue is out. Her face is contorted into the jovial face of a child, but without her hands jutting out from her temples or the expected “neener, neener, neener.” Her eyes are smiling.

Her face is familiar, but I don’t recognize her. It’s like looking at the photo of a friend when he or she was in high school. The same, but slightly different. Then, like a wave decomposing a sand castle or a camera’s flash, everything floods back.

That ultra-blond hair, almost white, pulled back in pigtails at the first meeting of our hallway that first month of classes. The way her eyes met mine like she devouring me in her mind. Joking with her roommates and the guy from third floor. The way-too-competitive rounds of computer games.

The collection of rubbers taped brazenly to the cement walls. Trying to keep her quiet even as the bunk squeaked, threatening to wake her roommates only feet away. The passion in her exaggerated moans and the rug-burn in the center of her back. The one she seemed to show off like a blue ribbon or spelling bee trophy.

The smell of smoke in her clothes. That she walked around with a towel over her head until her make-up was on. How she laughed with a blank expression. Her stubbornness colliding with mine and how she’d pout if she didn’t get her way.

How quickly I was discarded and so easily ignored. The vague reasons and inadequate explanation. The years where I didn’t hear from her directly and rarely saw her. The stories that came to me through tertiary sources of her promiscuity and recklessness. The palpable awkwardness that has seemed to saturate our meetings since.

It’s all back in such a brief moment, the span of a blink or uninterested shrug. I express my recognition, smile at the oddity of seeing her in such a strange way and nod my head as if to ask, “how goes?” I don’t bother taking my headphones off.

The light turns green and the car starts toward it. She shakes her head jokingly, but seems disappointed in my limited reaction. She turns and rests back in her seat, facing front.

I return to the pages of the book for a few more moments before the train arrives.