A silly conundrum, made out of clay. Wild, wild thoughts being the most magical of all. The Doors in his headphones. Japanese cherry blossom incense burning. Cherry blossoms were a kind of personal symbol to him. The brevity of life. Dust in the wind. Everything that mattered.
"She get high"... Always time for another day... another experience, another chance to poke the universe's big glittering brain. The All Brain. He didn't really believe in a deity, but he believed in the infinite. He was a romantic who happened to have found science. He was the logical Shaman. Determined to change the world. Quiet and loud at the same time. Timid and assertive. Battling the demons of his past with a sort of frenzied joy. Drug-addled, world-weary. Something from the pages of the past. A Merry Prankster. A simple man, trying to make his way in the universe. Hoping to see with eyes unclouded by hate. Ripping off everything that shines.
All that glitters may not be gold, but iron pyrite is a hell of a beautiful thing. You may not be accessing the Cosmos directly, but you're sure as hell touching the back of your brain. And that's cool too. It may not be Mexico, but the back yard has a beautiful tree growing there. You don't have to look very far to find splendour. It's all around us. It IS us.
Or so he thought. So Jude thought. He'd been trying to decide for a while now. Ever since he started thinking. The past seemed like a blur. He wasn't sure if he was blocking it out intentionally or if he'd simply lost that part of his life. Oh well. If it came back, he'd look at it. Until then, he'd look at other things.
Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll. Beauty, love, apocalypse. The smell of crayons. The colours in bubbles. The way cats look at you. The way certain cats look at you. The way blood falls out of farmed cows' throats and the way the slaughterhouse workers slip around in the blood. The way the music in the songs flows you to each new location gleefully. The way things remind us of people, whether we like it or not.
The end of the Universe is a rather grand idea, but the end of your self is just as cataclysmic. You'll never know the difference. The end of Humanity as we know it is usually considered to be worse than the end of the individual, but to the individual, it isn't very different. Value is relative. Value of life is arbitrarily assigned by living things.
Jude's mind went all over the place. When he pretended someone else was looking at his life, he was never quite sure who it was doing the looking. Mentally, he went above himself and looked down. Slender boy in a dark grey shirt. Wavy black hair touched his shoulders. He was holding an old CD player on his lap. A present from what felt like a past life. A bracelet of plastic beads circled his wrist. The letters spelled "JEFF." He was proud of it. Proud to be marked. He only ever approached people who would let him walk away. Everything he did was by choice. Ever since that one day (at band camp... but not. The day in college) when he'd nearly killed himself, every moment he lived was a choice he made. He chose to stay. Thus are Bodhisattva formed.
He moved slowly to the music, like a sort of elf. He knew he was an elf. He was an animation. He was a story being played out. He thought: "I know who I am. I am the Bull," and it was true. The animal he felt most closely. The reason that all torture seared his soul, but torture of bovines was unbearable. In his dreams, when they beat the tiny calves he had to look away, screaming and weeping.
Dreams. Dreams and songs. Stories and memories. Paintings and trees he'd sat under. All part of his story. And he wanted to share the parts that seemed important.
