What We Create

Ever notice when you move from one house to another you seem to find a stockpile of junk that you had completely forgotten about? It's unknown (even to yourself) why you would still have this type of useless crap...yet there it is on the shelf in the closet.

Some of the junk I found:
grocery receipt from 2002
work shirts from a job 5 years previous
blue jeans I wore in high school
pencils with my name on them from 3rd grade
fossilized pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum from the Mesozoic Era

I also found loads of other crap too plentiful to mention (including a non-working Nintendo 64). Perhaps I thought these items would be "handy" to have one day. Maybe I was waiting for the day that MacGyver would come to my house and need that fossilized pack of gum, broken wire hanger and strategy guide for Final Fantasy III to create a lethal potato gun (with scope).

After hours of packing I gave myself an ultimatum.

"That's it! If I haven't used it in over a year, I'm throwing it out!"

Six trips to the dump later...

I finally got everything boxed up and moved successfully. Thankfully, the load was a bit lighter after excising the huge chunk of dead weight from my closet.

One thing I found that still held some interest was a book a poetry I had written when I was about 19-years old. Oddly enough, I had named the compilation "Lyrical Coma". Some of the poems really gave me a chuckle, but one struck a chord with how I feel about the war in Iraq today and the rest of the world's disdain for the United States.

President Bush's approval rating is so low and his credibility so far damaged that not even a photo-op with an entire team of autistic basketball players could hope to improve it. Now this week we even have to be subjected to more of the administration's popular "Look Over There!" tactic with Operation: Swarmer.

Alas, I digress. Here's the poem I found.

What We Create

Death is contagious
The lies are outrageous
Who's going to save us
From what we create?

Build our destruction
Through constant construction
We wade in corruption
Of sick, blackened hate.

We all praise ambition
Forget our condition
And sink to submission
And then contemplate.

We spread the infection
Ignore the defection
Avoid the rejection
But never escape.

Life still feels empty
In this crumbling city
Death is so pretty...
It's what we create.

Maybe next week I'll see what else I can pull out of the closet. Until then I need to get back to sorting paystubs from my old jobs in chronological order.