Shake Senora

Tonight is Halloween, the year 2023 CE or so they say according to most modern calendars. I am drinking tonight, like every other night, not much has changed. But tonight after a long and exhausting day of work in the tattered wastelands of America, I broke out the mead horn from that beloved cow goddess and here I am, drinking once again from unwashed horns, celebrating another year of survival in these trying dark times, when many others I knew a couple years ago are no longer here to celebrate the gift of life.

Two of my brothers passed last year, along with my dog, a few of my friends and our grandparents. How blessed I am to still be here after six long years of struggle, blessed to recall their memories on this wonderful day of the dead. "Fear not," they say, "for the gods are with you". After struggling and battling against life's colossal giants, against gas shortages, toilet paper shortages, a few political wars and scamdemics, having suffered through mega super storms and hatred, racism, scandals, infiltrations, global attacks, woke cultures and drug addictions, alcoholism, inflations and everything in-between... Truly I am blessed, or cursed, to survive and live to remember them all.

"Fear not," they say, for none of them can stop the times. It is fated, and I always believed it to be true. Ready to die, I was, on my own deathbed, stricken by that man-made virus which will never go away. Yet many injuries have I myself sustained since then. I'm getting older now, as are the ones I grew close to over the years. The tattoos permanently marked my flesh, reminders of those stories and the people I have outlived, whose fates have since become imbedded personally into part of my own legacy every time I look into that gazing mirror.

Getting old am I, rusting on the inside, yet I am not obsolete. My heart has failed, my kidneys swollen, liver charcoal and lungs of soot, so many ailments sore from fighting countless battles, able to feel every approaching winter and rainstorm through fractured and broken bones, bruised ribs and dislocated joints that have healed countless times. I am mocked and ridiculed, yet no man has witnessed the troubles I myself have endured and survived to talk about. I don't recall my tears, my sadness, or the memory of my childhood fears for all of those things have eluded me for quite some time to the point where I have forgotten them. Even now, the pain that once was so unbearable and uncomfortable has become rather lucid. I can still feel it, it's there, but not beyond withstanding for I have adapted to it, adopted it like a shadow and acquainted it with my many spirits and my inner being.

The possum plays dead, but it does not weep nor roar, nor squeel in weakness. Though suffering, it shows no mercy, no sign of dying. It does not bark, nor cry for help. It does not ask for mercy or forgiveness. Instead it goes on to live it's best life, doing what it does best. It keeps on fighting, keeps on scavaging, keeps it's mind on the good fight. Not for itself, but for its offspring and the future of its species. Oh what wonders, what lessons man could learn from such a thing as being an animal, remembering who we are. Young people will never understand, but the older people get, the less they will fear if their spirits are in alignment with the fates. Immortal am I, a god in this decaying skin blanket of shattered bones and bags of bad blood, ruptured lining of pain and misery.

Who should I succumb to now? And whoever did I fear back then? I am pagan, and from the Earth was I given a chance at life. I squandered it, shamelessly, living my best life, gaining wisdom through personal experience and learning things that future folk would only taste from books and movies. Immortal am I, for they will only find myself in themselves through dreams and fantasies. I have regretted many things in my life, yet I have no shame, no attachment to such things. I am a mad man indeed, driftwood on the planes, destined for my calling. Fear death? Lol like the bright Bride of Beetlejuice, I welcome it with open arms, with a C in science and an A in math, I welcome tonight on this night, Halloween night, the only ones who ever truly knew me from the beginning.

https://youtu.be/2jhyLNoPYyY?feature=shared