Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : Great Awakening

It’s hard to explain to people who don’t write fiction what it’s like to become a channel for a story. The worst writers approach their fiction with an absolute end in mind. It’s okay to have a concept and a “feeling” for the story and then write from that. But one must be pliable and willing to bend the way the tale unfolds all the while keeping all sense focused on theme, arc, tragedy, and consequence.

And there is a zone, believe it. Soemtimes I have written things while in the zone that, years later, it’s like a stranger wrote the words. And although I am my own worst critic, sometimes I am pleasantly surprised by what I find.

The other day, I cam across about sixty pages of a novel I started four or five years ago and put down for some reason or other. Here is the first chapter:

Great Awakening by Joshua MintonThe End

The secret of a great marriage is two-fold. The first thing you have to do is bare your thoughts and fears completely to another person. The second thing is to apologize immediately when you know you’re wrong and to always forgive when you know that you’re right.

The secret of politics is to stay as far away from them as possible. Treat politics like an overbearing stranger who approaches you aggressively on a dark street.

Now, Jason, you don’t have to worry about the secret of life for many years now, but you need to be prepared for the question because it is by far the most deceiving of all of life’s major questions that mature adults must search out for themselves. But when the time does come, consider the meaning of the question of meaning.

I offer this advice to you, young man—when you’re old enough to confront the concept of death and truly understand its enormous implication, you will be proffered for a meaning. Everyone is standing with their hands clenching outturned pockets, blank expressions on their face and their shoulders shrugging. What does it mean?!—this is what they are not saying but Help Me?! is what they mean.

Picture the perfect death—this is the secret everyone use to murder each other over—the secret that many have understood and gone beyond. Yet it is still such a secret that so many more people need to understand before everyone can hit that next stage of consciousness.

Jason, the secret of life is this: Picture the perfect death as a goal and then work backwards, setting benchmarks of achievement that go as far back as this very minute. Now you’ve got a timeline and a goal list. All you need to do is supply the talent, desire to gain skill sets, and faith in the inherent goodness of time, existence, emotion, and the universe itself. Men have been killing for this secret knowledge for 4,000 years when it’s available to any honest and serious thinking heart and mind. There is no cost for this treasure, other than the time to put the thoughts together, the mental energy to spend on the experiences that provide applied understanding, and a depth of heart that loves and supports the community you find yourself in. Life teaches lessons by the millisecond, Jason. You’ve got to be really quick to catch them all.

The old man held his grandson on his knee while the rocking sofa creaked against the evening sounds on the Miracle Farm. His grandson just turned eight today and he was spending his birthday in his most favorite place doing his most favorite of activities—lap rocking in eve of his grandfather’s oak tree, listening to the old man talk in his sing-song and drawn out voice. His grandfather’s tone was always laughing, praying, and cursing at the same time.

Larry Miracle was a teacher pure and simple. He was first a devoted father. Then he was an attentive husband. Then he was an enlightened trillionaire who gave millions to charities of his own choosing. He spent laborious hours pouring over the charter documents of organized charities. He refused to give to any charity with a paid staff. Miracle money shaped the world in his image and with same stroke of love with which he was received by humanity during a crisis point and saved everyone through the perfect blend of reason, emotion, and spiritual inspiration.

Larry Miracle was a decent carpenter, having made several of the pieces placed at strategically cogitated locations throughout Miracle Farm.

A white tinged yellow tabby head rushed Miracle’s shin and figure eighted to the other. He extended his arm to the ground and frisked his fingers together, drawing the cat who was now purring.

J, the secret of getting a cat to like you is to rub a little earwax on your fingers and let them lick it off. Do this three times and you’ve got a friend for life. Of course, a cat was still eat your face if you happen to die and lay undiscovered on the floor for four days.

His grandson scrunched up his face in revolt and Miracle laughed. He was sardonic at times and his humor often offended more than it amused.

Lawrence Miracle was a former President of the United States and leader of a globe spinning chaotically off balance and in danger of tipping beyond the returning point. The world was now as peaceful as the silence between one hinge creak and another of the glider that now supported this frail man with long white hair tucked back into a thick pony tail and the handsome blonde grandson who sat attentive and adoring in his grandfather’s lap.

The United States of Earth now held geodemocratic presence on every continent as well as the lunar colony which had registered for charter only sixteen months prior to this moment in time. And the system was working.

The founding documents of this culture were the very same that once founded that Eastern country where men wore powdered wigs, carried walking canes and used quill toothpicks to dislodge the nightly fare of low lit restaurants that only held the clicking of glass together and what remained the patriotic ether that bound human beings together in a way that only happened once since—under the Miraculous Reign as his tenure of leadership had now come to be called with the solid respect lacking in terms like The Roaring 80s or The 90s Scandals.

The democratization of the earth was accomplished through a layering of words and sentiment at some parts of the process and by the muzzle of a gun and the single use of a low-yield nuclear weapon at the right place and the right time.

Beyond that, Lawrence Miracle was single handedly responsible for accomplishing in two terms what the British Empire did not over several hundreds of years accomplish—making democracy take root in the so-called third world heart and mind. He accomplished this because he threw away terminology and talking points and spoke to the people of his world like they were intelligent beings that could understand the workings of interpersonal relationships between men and women in all of facets of existence—man to man, man to woman, woman to woman and larger and larger groups of people to other groups of people. Everyone can know the secret, he always said—all they need is a point in the right direction and a stiff kick in the ass. Sometimes, he always followed this anecdote up with, a simple point is all it takes but most of the time you end up spraining a leg muscle.

But there were times when a kick to the ass wasn’t enough. At one point, Islamists (Islamic Fascist) terrorists infected a few letters and mailed them out to targeted individuals, unleashing a stream of human misery and needless suffering that might have widened into a river if it had not been for the defense and response. The individuals were caught in hours even though they were holed up in a dusty cellar in a desert neighborhood in the Middle East with an unpronounceable name on the North American continent.

There were four of them and they were sentenced to the Barbara Olsen and Rudolph Giuliani Public Prison where they were forced to live the remainder of their lives in a twenty by thirty cell that was protected by clear concrete (a marvelous invention of transparent building materials that allowed clear views into and through buildings).

These blasphemers of the will of the divine lived their days in full view of the public they so despised that they would attack and maim without provocation or justification. Teenagers often gathered to smoke marijuana and gawk at the Islamists as they used the facilities—showering, defecating, urinating, pleasing themselves—nothing was private for these criminals. They were nothing more than zoo animals now at the mercy of the public’s undying attention—a hell far worse than Dante’s soaring imagination ever dared to proffer.

Terrorism was a thing of the past as was economic deficiency in the global market of the exchange of goods, services, and ideas.

But all of this public nonsense was the last thing on Larry’s mind as he sat and rocked his grandson in the late August evening of Eastern Ohio.

The crickets had taken over the voice of the outside world and the moonlight split and sprinkled through the stretched up maples of his farm. There were virgin trees in the government nature preserve that bordered his retirement property and he often felt as if were in the protective palm.

He entered his home, closing the round wooden door behind him.

He punched in the house alarm code as he wiped his feet on the boot brush rug and called out for his wife.
She responded from down the north hallway and he began walking toward her voice.

Nancy and Larry Miracle had been married for almost fifty years now and she always found new ways to amaze him. She was always changing, morphing, improving; whether a new hairstyle, outrageous handbags and hats, spiked heel shoes or scuffed ballerina flats, she swung back and north so many times that to catch her in definition was to already have missed.

Time had never been able to grab Nancy and hang on and this was why Miracle loved her—the eternal motor pump that kept their little Fountain of Youth flowing all these years. She was something like the cool breeze that catches wetness on bare skin and makes it feel like ice.

He entered the room she was sitting in to find her cross-legged and wrapping a birthday present for her niece. Hi sweetheart. He bent to kiss her. Hi baby. She craned her neck to receive his affection. You wrappin’ Wilma’s present? He asked her without honest interest. Yep. She answered as uninterested as he did. Well, I’m gonna’ hit the hay, babe. Love you.

He turned to leave the room and then turned back to her as she put a ribbon between her lips and squinted at the tape line on the triangle fold of the package side. She mouthed UMK SUVEETHARD through pursed lips and he smiled at the expression which was one of his favorites. He shuffled back up to the foyer and kept going straight down the south hall to his bedroom.

After showering, shaving, and brushing his teeth, he laid down between 2000 thread count white cotton sheets, sighed the exhalation of an expert at the end of a demanding day. He closed his eyes and died as left the world as peacefully as he had entered it.

photo credit: sup sauce?