If you’re interested, e-mail me at obryen at gmail dot com.

Morality (good and evil) is one of humanity’s great works of art (yes, there are multiple moralities, but run with the singular for now). It hits home for most of us, but like all art, some of us just don’t get it, and those who do aren’t necessarily having the same reaction. It has no direct relationship to the natural process of creation and destruction (nor said process’ counterpart, order), but we often confuse morality with something innate to existence. We made it up, but that makes it all the more important and personal to us as people. If it were written in the foundation of creation, it would be too broad, as closely related to a single atom as to the human race, too inaccessibly huge and universal. In building it ourselves, we have based it on ourselves, making it exactly what we need it to be.

I like blueberry muffins.

The Sun’s Fury
by Lucas McCain

An angry bloom of yellow light surrounds the burning sun.
Though tempered by the night’s respite, her rage is never done.

His Earthen face of rock and dust reflects her angry light,
His heart, once overcome by lust, is hidden out of sight.

Apart, these polar partners turn as distantly they fly.
But once, together they did burn throughout the endless sky.

The Earth was not yet rocky so, but molten to his rim.
And Sun, she burned alone to show her glowing love for him.

She held him in her fiery arms and touched his flame-kissed lips.
Their fusion sparked, his earthly charms against her solar hips.

But Earth was prone to wander, and quite distantly he’d roam.
His desire was beyond her, so she’d wait ‘til he came home.

His orbit stretched away and near a star with eyes that shone.
He chanced to sit awhile and stay so she might be his own.

The pair believed themselves alone when their lust had begun.
But in their throes, her starlight shone so bright it reached the sun.

She caught them in the act; she burned the harlot to a spark.
And he, in bitter sadness, turned his face towards the dark.

He fled to frigid depths of space, and lost his molten love.
It showed no longer on his face, nor outwardly thereof.

The couple, homeward bound, returned, but never did they speak.
And never now, her love adjourned, his hidden, sad and meek.

They circle twice across the sky, but for a minute, stare,
As if to ask each other why, but nothing moves despair.

Bride of the Moon
by Lucas McCain (that’s my pen name)

Alone, at peace, she bathed on the shore,
the shallows and deeps were her own.
Her skin aglow with the silver she wore,
a gift from the moon as he shone.

And such the moon as he was, he pined,
he pined for someone to hold,
To touch, to join together in kind,
his heart to ever enfold.

He gathered up the sea with his might
and pulled her in with the tide.
But as he called her to join the night,
the sailor came for his bride.

He saw at once what the moon dared to do,
and freed his boat from the moor.
He marked the wind as it quietly blew
and drifted out from the shore.

He sailed through waters as black as the night,
a cold and silent lagoon.
And onward still to the loneliest light,
to claim his bride from the moon.

He traced his arc through the night and the sky.
The moon came down to the sea.
And there they met, and there he did cry,
“You’ll come to the heavens with me.”

“We’ll ride in stardust and mirror the sun,
whose light has always been mine.”
“With you and I together as one,
yet twice as bright shall we shine.”

She saw the sails as they rode on the foam,
a sharpened angle of white.
“My husband comes to deliver me home,
and take me away from the night.”

He saw his lover aglow with the moon,
her face as bright as her soul.
He wept, for never could earth’s dimmest gloom
her beauty display so whole.

The wheel did turn and turned away
the boat to wander home.
“Your husband wishes that you should stay
and join me in the gloam.”

Departing from the water’s edge,
the moon embraced his bride,
And took his place among the stars,
and she took hers beside.

Forever they stroll the stardust trail,
but sometimes she will go
Away to watch her husband sail
upon the sea below.

I wanna do it again.

Moving on. Being a busboy is hard. It’s a good job, and I’m good at it for being so new to it (partly because I had a job in Chicago that was fairly similar), but holy crap do my legs hurt. The place has an upstairs dining area (key word: stairs) and a basement (key word: stairs [shut up with your corrections, silly sub-brain]} where’d the curly brace come from?), and I get to climb both sets of stairs all day long. Fuckin’ ow.

Oh, and I have to wear a solid black shirt. I don’t have a solid black shirt, which is fine, I can buy one soon, but for now I’m wearing my Bob Dole shirts inside out (for those of you who don’t actually know me, I have a bunch of Bob Dole t-shirts I made a few years ago). Now, if you’ve never worn a silk-screened t-shirt inside out, you should be warned: it hurts your nipples. I am a man, a proud man, but a man with nipples just the same, and having a silk-screened image scraping them all day made me feel I’d just run a marathon and forgotten to tape them up. It fucking hurts.

But hey: I got to ride in a cab in NYC. On somebody else’s dime. They sent me to pick up cookies from another bakery, and I got to boss around a cab driver and act like I was two years of white slavery away from being important (which would mean that I’ve been practicing my important man’s voice since I was first shipped here in a crate from Norwegia eight years ago [it's a ten year program, y'all]). The cab driver farted and rolled down the windows without a word. He knew how important I almost was.

And now, in the night, there is a cute Australian girl in my room watching a movie with her boyfriend. O, tempora. O, mores. O, there’s gum on the wall. Let’s concentrate on that instead.

But things are different!  My life is different.  Two weeks ago, I moved to New York City in search of the American Dream: to be a PA (production assistant) and a game tester and to eat really good pizza.  So far I’ve done none of those things (although I am scheduled for a PA gig next week, hell yes), but I did get a job today.  Just got hired as a busboy at a place downtown, and I’m pretty damn happy.  They play good music, the people are nice, and I can take home leftover food at the end of the day (just stuffed myself on catfish, chicken, penne with pesto, and some kind of chickpea dish that was really good).  It pays well enough for me to live here and pursue my other interests, so I’m set.

In the past few months, I’ve made significant progress with my depression.  I realized one night that I’m a very deliberate person.  Most of what I do in the day to day is thought out heavily, rarely stemming from an unconsidered impulse.  That deliberation, however, had never extended to my internal depressive rant, which was all about knee-jerk self-loathing and non-specific rage.

So I stopped.  My mind is as much my own as my body and behavior, so I can control it as well.  I don’t let myself get into my horrible tangents of hatred anymore.  Also, weird lighting doesn’t ruin me like it did, because I started looking at things differently.

Literally differently.  Not “just try looking at it from somebody else’s perspective” (which requires an eye transplant without severing the optical nerve), but actually applying artistic principles to my vision.  I frame things now, adding composition to my field of view.

Say there’s an old, rotting building in front of me, and a gray sky behind that.  Depressing, right?  But if I were to see that in a photograph, I’d be mystified, not morose, so I give it boundaries, trying out different dimensions until I find the right composition to turn what I see into mental art.

It works very well.  Harlem is beautiful because I can frame it.  The subway is dynamic rather than claustrophobic.  Fluorescent lights become archaically alien, mysterious in their discoloring glow, and all the gray in the world is a unifying desaturation.

And my life makes sense.  I’ve been unhappy for so long not because I’m broken, or because I’m meant to continue, but to teach me patience, empathy, and humility.  What was I before I was depressed?  I was a nine year old.  I was self-centered, arrogant, uncaring, cruel, just a generally ruinous little boy.  Cute, but wrong.

Then I hit 10 and something changed in me.  The self-criticism showed up, and along with it came the self-hate, the inability to look forward and anticipate change.  What good could come of a 10 year old kid searching his chemistry set for poison to drink?

I am what I am (and I am Popeye).  I like who I am.  Somewhere in all that chaos and hell, there was a point, a goal, and I think I’ve reached it (or gotten in sight of it).  I feel at once peaceful and lively, like a chorus of dynamos humming in harmony.  The pain wasn’t a bonesaw, disassembling and crippling me.  It was a chisel, a carving knife, removing that which was not me, which should not be me.

New York.  Biggest, toughest city in the world, and I get to live there.  Thank you.

I originally discovered the spider when I killed/stunned two flies within a couple minutes of each other, and immediately found the spider running out and grabbing them, then bringing them back and webbing them up. It was awesome.

So with my new fly victim, I’ve set it outside the spider’s doorstep in hopes that it’ll receive my little care package and know my good will.  Here’s to partnership.