Writing is a magical portal for me to escape from reality, a sort of near-astral body experience Dr. Strange does so effortlessly. It is a particular alchemy of literature where thoughts become images and then come alive, flitting in the garden of senses. Or I can fly across the blue firmament chasing the Sun Chariot and riding on the Moon Chariot and glide on the first ray of sunrise.
Although these days I haven’t written as much as I used to because of work and other matters, a desire for writing always stays as an undying ember glowing in a phosphorous blue diamond so rare and beautiful in the abyss of malaise. I don’t believe that writing is not a prerogative of elites, nor a status symbol of the perfect grammarians. As long as you can communicate your spirits and souls in words and strike the chords of readers, that makes you a good writer, and that’s a joy to see your magic working.
Writers- I mean whoever writes, not just professional writers- possess a spirit of poetic madness or a gift of seeing spirits in every living thing in this universe, akin to a Sybil or a Sherman. Therefore, anyone possessed with a desire for writing can see things that others can’t see and, what’s more, begin to form the shapes of the unseen. For these reasons, writing to me brings me the joy of being a wonderful white witch of beauty.
It’s gone viral. Sensational it’s been. The latest scare, the newest horror, comes in Backrooms, a YouTube phenomenon that has swept the world’s compass in muffled terror. I have seen it through an algorithm, and I think I have entered the door into the backrooms – willingly by the winks of intrigued moments. Is this the way people get lost in the maze of horror? Even if they are fictional, or so they like to think, nothing is purely fictional without some foundation in reality. Be it ever imaginary, a mental void, emotional distress, continual depression, or perpetual heartaches will be of their backrooms with seemingly no way out. And I think this feeling of utter hopelessness is where Christianity fills or saves the wretchedness of a soul with a promise of hope, the existence of a reason to go on in a seemingly purposeless life.
Watching a few of the Backrooms series makes me realize that this is how the present-day MZ generation sees a concept of a labyrinth where King Minos of Crete at Knossos kept his illegitimate half-man, half-bull son Minotaur and feeds him on Athenian youths until the Athenian hero Theseus with the help of Adrianne’s thread ball came to the rescue and killed the monster. Is it considered too cheesy for today’s youths to think of Adrianne’s thread ball? Backrooms are all devoid of Christian hope and Greek wit because new generation kids are too smart to believe the existence of such saving grace because there is none of such nonsense, and because they are simply the best of all generations wallowing in the advanced civilization only countable steps below the most advanced extraterrestrial beings in the universe.
Notwithstanding the ingenious idea of creating such terrifying liminal places within a minimal budget, the whole series will shine in its brilliance as a genre of online game series rather than a film in the fashion of a fake documentary as a new Blaire Witch Project. As civilization gets more technologically advanced, the people become more highly primitive, returning to the laws of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth with no signs of light-heartedness as if it were synonymous with simple-mindedness or backwardness. And I don’t know why Verdi’s “The Chorus of Hebrews” keeps playing in my mind these days.
Letters of Note: Cats is an adoringly compiled individual narrative about their cats in an epistolary form by famous people, ranging from Nikola Testa, the Romanian prodigy of the electrical invention, to the unforgettable actress of the 20th century Elizabeth Taylor, and so on whose affection for their feline babies is universally communicable across time and space.
Of all those words from the hearts, Elizabeth Taylor’s letter to her dear cat, who went missing after being moved to a new Californian home from their Welsh home, profoundly touches my heart. Those loves, those memories, those longings all flow from artless words written in tears and project how much she misses her flurry child without florid elaboration. Her cat is not just a “pet” but a “companion” who has seen her in the saddest moment under the darkest sky without make-up. Reading her letter, I felt like I knew the actress personally, as she shared her insecurity without such a dear friend who used to stay by her side. How would I live without my two cats by my side? I would have written a similar letter to Toro and Camille.
The creator of this lovely anthology of letters, Shaun Usher, never seems to cease his creativity, zeal, and humanity after his first publication of Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience in 2013, resulting in a decade-long successful Letters series. I have seen musicians exhausted with their creative flairs for making new albums, either by adhering to their prior hit album music style or morphing into a different avant-garde-styled musical experiment, but not Shaun Usher, whose fountain of creativity is welled from faith in humaneness universal in all humankind. It is not to lionize or canonize Usher for the Letters series, nor to idolize him mindlessly in the heat of instant adulation as a gullible reader, whom Edgar Allen Poe might have frowned upon, but as a reader of the unique third eye that can see a writer’s true colors. So, if you love cats with hearts and like to read and write letters – okay, I will also include emails for MZ generation readers – reading Letters of Cats will be a pleasure.
What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
The three most important things for a good life are made of these: good stable employment, love of self, and a sense of humor. As we are both social and individual beings, the aforesaid are the essence of happiness in life that would provide me with a sense of security and a healthy environment in which I can find my inner potential creative power without worrying about the ills of reality.
While money isn’t everything, anyone must sustain a livelihood, such as clothing, food, and housing. Without it, the deprivation of material necessity will impede a creative, lively spirit’s yearning and opportunity to express under the burden of life. Which will also lead to a despaire of oneself. IT is not to say that only those with secure jobs are self-confident, but it is also challenging to maintain a level of confidence when you are down and out, moving from one job to another, like a wandering nomad. True that even a panhandler can be content with himself, but then it must be he transacendes the ways of this world, completely detached from the needs of this world into his own earthly nirvana. Lastly but not leastly, a sense of humor is a handmaid to goodness that will change a heaven hell and a hell heaven. At the moement of despair, any humorous dialogue or scene from a comedy movie or a funny moment of life will moementarily take off the clouds of disappointment or depression.
You and I deserve happiness and the good life because we are such starstuff as dreams are made of, harvesting sunlight from the heavens excellently brilliant. I hope my reader will have good lives because we are worth it.
How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?
When a toy is wound up, it has to be released to get it moved, or it will be broken without performing its feat of vitality. Likewise, when stress is raised to the highest on a mercury thermometer, my body shudders in a quiver, and my hand turns to a white slate, inhibiting my speech faculty, which results in murderous migraines. It’s a genuinely psychosomatic experience, which makes me dumbfounded and speechless by a poisoned arrow to the heart.
Such is my present status of mind. The stress from working under a manager who lacks experience in leadership, patience, understanding, and knowledge is so high that going to work every morning feels like a daily ritual of torment. She belittles my ability by magnifying the mistakes I make. She constantly intimidates me in such a toxic environment that I see no point in demonstrating my capabilities to the extent possible. However, this ordeal of mental torture can’t go on any longer because it affects my physical and mental health. I deserve respect and recognition. So, I have decided to bring this issue to my supervising attorney, as encouraged by my colleagues at work, who have also witnessed the mistreatment by my manager. I will tell him on Monday that we are incompatible with working because of personality issues, which prevent me from performing my work to the extent possible. Even if my voicing out will bring about a counteractive result, I must tell it to him in defense of my abused spirit.
Shakespeare said, “We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body.” That is what I am experiencing, and because of it, I have lost my motivation to do things I used to love doing, such as writing and reading. Even if I lose a job, I want to let my crying soul be heard and protect myself from her ongoing raving rants like a foaming rabid dog.
If you run into Otto on the street or in a store, your eyes will see him as a grumpy old man who would cavil at one cent for everything. But if we look at him with the mind, he is quite a character for sure, and you will fail to dislike him once you know him and his secret. He is very good at fixing machines, from dishwashers to radiators, bicycles, and cars. He is also a fine babysitter and a great driving instructor. But as God is arguably fair in evenly distributing talents in us, Otto has a hard time mastering one thing: the art of killing himself. And boy, shouldn’t he thank God for such failed experience?
Otto is a lonely man in his sixties who lost his love of life and dear wife, Sonya, to cancer. Sadness comes not in a single spy but in the battalion, for he has just been forced to retire from his long-term job due to the juggernaut of changing generations at his workplace, as with other places. He has no children but himself, and as Sonya was the beacon of Light in his already reticent and shy life, he sees no light, joy, or meaning in life. The world suddenly turned grim and dreary. Otto is wrapped in his sorrow and besieged in loneliness under the roof of distress. We are privileged to look into the psychology of the destitute in the darkest night of the soul distressed in utter loneliness, which can be broken with a light of kindness and humor as shown by Otto’s new lively and lovely neighbors Marisol and her family.
Humor is a handmaid of Hope, which Otto needs on the dark night of his soul. So, as the name suggests, Marisol and her pleasantly vivacious family bring the beauty of Sea and Sun to Otto’s Dungeon of Despondency with lots of laughs followed by tears and more laughs that will make anyone harnessed with a yore of life lightened. And since Otto is secretly a big-hearted person – literally and clinically – he slowly but surely warms to the warmth of friendship and love and shows his true colors as radiantly gorgeous as afternoon sunshine showering the brilliantly golden orange trees in summer. Oh, and there is a homeless cat that seems to be Sonya’s familiar in cat skin sent by her from heaven to be his company.
Otto is one lucky person to be surrounded by a loving community of neighbors, who becomes an alternate form of a family with emotional support and care, often overlooked and ignored by overtly advocated individualism with no face of humanity. Indeed, that doesn’t mean returning to agrarian society or something to the effect of the notoriously puritanical Salem, where everyone cast a jaundiced and suspicious eye on the targeted loner in the community, with trademark gossiping and ostracizing. Showing care shouldn’t be complicated because one can just say hi by trying to understand why the person behaves the way they are. I believe that is how we can prevent suicides by detecting sadness from the person instead of devolving the person to a therapist or counselor or ignoring them as if they were invisible or a burden to care. Just like Marisol and his family have shown, Light defeats Darkness. And everyone deserves Laughter.
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