There are things I would like to believe in, but eventually have to reevaluate due to conflicting evidence that plays out in front of me. There are things I do not want to believe in, but am forced to by being confronted with their existence. There is also that which I believe in and which becomes stronger in my mind and heart because I see the truth of it reinforced without my intending to seek that corroboration.

I have been angling toward a self for many years. Or stripping away masks from this Self for many years. Perhaps I was taught some of this naked self I approach. Perhaps it is where I have always been meant to end up, and would have found those parts anyway. I do not have answers about this self I seek, or about CHICANISMO. I do not even know what that is. I am just a person seeking to know what he believes (given a chance to consider it), and feels (left alone with it), and thinks (by himself), and who wants to do so without his own aversion born from fear or indoctrination. I do not want to be a slave. I do not want to be quiet. I do not want to be hypnotized. I do not want to be coerced or manipulated. I do not want to be deceived. I do not want to be limited. I want to always find something new. I want to be free. And I want others to be free.

I believe there is a natural hunger and a natural violence that plays out in the world. I grew up with a half-wolf dog ("Tucket") who hunted sheep and who would tear the skin off the back of a tiny, yapping, domesticated lap-poodle when it got up in his snout. I watched my dog come back home with buckshot in his face for these hunts. I watched my adopted father pick the shot out with a knife. Tucket was the sweetest, kindest animal who would let children ride him and pull his long hair, and he could not even bark physically, though he would never even try to bark at children. Yet, everywhere he went, he was feared, chased out of yards, owners getting guns, I would have to get him home quick. I met the cruel battle that waits in school the one fostered between boys who want girls, between girls who want the same boy, between bigger and smaller, between darker and lighter. I've received the violence of strangers simply because they recoiled to something in me that I wasn't even aware of. I've given it back, because eventually, I didn't want any more. I was raised by the hand of a man from a different clan. He saw other tribes as enemies. I grew up in the house of my enemy. I believe there is a natural violence to the world.

I believe that good food is given by the planet. I think it needs sun and water. But seeds are everywhere, and they will always grow. Love and care from a human can bring that food into the human's life. With our hearts removed or overwhelmed, our hands and our minds bring harm to our food. We desire, with greed, to sell more, grow more quicker, have all foods from all lands at all times in all places. We are the ones who cook up lab concoctions that we wait ten years to tell people are killing them. We are the ones who feed animals things they would never eat. We are the ones who change stickers to sell meat longer, we are the ones who inject fake sun and wind into these animals, we are the ones who construct self-cleaning dungeons and yammering blades for these creatures who patiently await us, their skin of root and petal and rocks, their mouths and hands of loam and branches and sea-sharpened stones; their chests with the invisible human heart, the fate of our own kind.

I believe there is a magic that is always with us, I believe we can reach in and find the ever unspooling thread of harm. We can always reach in and find the renewing, rebalancing, everpresent, ever-resonant, ever-pure, everabundant love. Perhaps our world has reduced inner peace to a chemical equation that Lilly, Diazepam and Roche will sell your doctor to sell to you, but I don't buy it. Perhaps magic is loose in the world, but man is lazy, and we are staining our fingers and cheeks and hands with the easy kind, and can hardly see straight anymore. I believe we must be careful with what we recite. I believe there are great powers within us. I believe we work our spells clumsily and casually. I believe we have abdicated reverence and humility and our knowledge of our part in the Whole, and it is killing our gods.

I see that we go mad, and call this madness progress. It energizes us, though, it is electric; it remains movement of a kind. I have felt it, I know that thrill. I feel a deeper affinity, though, with the earth; with the sun; with the water. I find truths in these places that destroy the febrile weave of radio-static reason laying over and between so many of our encounters like sunlight on fungus; that abolish the mind-numbing mental finger-tapping we call conversation. I have felt trapped in this box of convention and social ritual since I first began thinking on things; I feel like the girl in the swordbox on stage. I am tired of this "magic" trick, and I have somewhere to go. I am not thirsty for the synthetic-chromium elixir of civilization. I want to walk, to find some place untouched by mankind, some place where the heart of the world still speaks to the humble human creature. I am going mad in this game. I am overbrimming with tears at this game. I am bored to death in this game.

I, the lyingest liar of all men, want nothing more than to be true. Say what you will: I take things too seriously, I jump to conclusions, I'm extreme, I'm reactionary, I'm vinyl, I'm glass, I'm wood, I'm uncle steve. In the end, nobody's perception of me means anything. I cannot become confused with the signposts meant for someone else's journey. I cannot become lost in this. I keep coming back to what is true for me. It's all I want to know, it's all I want to be. I do not want to see people suffer. I do not want to see selfish, rich, unevolved men rule the world. I shudder and spit and tear at myself to be so helpless in the face of so much corruption and greed and ignorance. I feel I see so much, and what can I do? Pah, I am an "artist," how grand of me. I am able to dabble in paint or with sticks while the world burns. Cities flicker into a phosphorous glare, diseases tear across continents, children grow up on racks, and I sit here and write? Stand here and paint? Drag my thumb across strings? I want to throw my life off the cliffs, I want to be shot down with a million arrows as long as I can run up the hill at dawn, feel the sunrise upon my face. I want to be of use, to make a difference, to know that what I dream is not for nothing, that my heart does not ache in vain. I loathe myself for my comfort and my relative ease when I think of so many suffering at every moment. I know there are so many children who are right now in homes that are killing them, that there are so many people with empty bellies, so many people with nowhere to go, and I live in a world where facts like this can be reasoned into some area of Discussion, where we can postulate and blogtificate and scratch our bellies and laugh it off over a cool Flash video. I curl my lip to watch all the typing typing typing and we're all so consumed with our copyright and our calling cards and our cash balance. We're bugs sunning on a rock. Nobody here can talk about falsity. Me least of all.

What do I resist?

I resist losing my childmind, the one that sees clearly without needing to find tons of words. I resist being handled. I resist being corralled into the combine that degrades all humans into lunchmeat, regardless of skin color. I resist performing when I don't want to. And I resist defining myself solely in terms of resistance. I want to become purer, truer, less full of a need to prove myself, to pretend, or to parade for the benefit of any imagined Other. I want to help those who have suffered, but mostly who have suffered as I have, and most of all those who suffer right now, and needlessly.

The world gives us pain, and we can meet that as a curse, a gift, a debt. All three. More. We can find others who we feel know that pain, and when we have learned from it, we can help them. In helping them, we continue our own journey. It is all one, it should be all one. Is "Chicanismo" a part of this? Just another name for a stop on the Long tour? Is it all one?

No matter what I call ideas, what questions remain, or what educated people can say about my words or my feelings or my life, it does not matter. I am seeking a truth, I am here to stand where I feel I must, to defend what I feel I must, to seek what I have forgotten, to resist what feels a falsity or a harm. As much as I love them, words are not always so important. If they are, I hope these serve well. I have written them, I remain the same as I was when I began. Sure—mostly in my silences—of what is true, and what is not. Constantly forgetting what I know so well. Walking the path the best I know how.