God how I hate religion! Man is so damn pious and holier than thou with his sacraments and vestments and testaments and regiments…God how I hate religion.
What a small world it would be if all we were living for was to join some church or some synagogue or some temple or some mosque and subject our bodies and minds to the discipline au jour…Lord, Lord, I hardly knew you…
Ha! I tried that one too. I think it was right after about 20 days of Orange sunshine and window pane acid…wasn’t that what we called those little orange pills and that stuff on a blotter that we kept in the freezer? Oh you missed that trip? Good for you…
Yeah hair cuts and right living…less drugs and no drinking…buckle down and read the paper…go to church and do my homework…Dear Lord I was a good boy at 19. I was a good, good boy for a little while. My house was clean and my clothes were washed…and the roaches all went upstairs to my neighbors for food…Yes Lord, life was good. Mmmmm…It was good. And I was good. And everything was good…until the fall.
I was a good Pharisee…I was a righteous man in my own eyes…I was a well painted mausoleum…looking good and being white…washed that is…and I was asking Jesus what should I do to escape the wrath to come…mmmmm…
Then I watched my dumb ass self fall from heaven, at least from the pedestal I had constructed for myself somewhere in the clouds…and I fell back to earth…oh and great was that fall brothers and sisters…Mmmmm…give me a hallelujah…amen.
Thankfully somebody with a little more common sense woke me up and showed me the way more perfectly…and it was a thrilling and humbling experience…
That’s when I became a misfit. Are any of you misfits? Or maybe you’re a Ragamuffin?
@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
DAY TWO
Hello again.
Sometimes I marvel how quickly I burned through my first life…
When it ended I felt like a middle aged character from a Dickens novel. The big difference being that I was barely 20 years old.
As good as I was at weaving my complicated persona to cover up the fear and weakness inside me, the threads weren’t strong enough to hold it all together. And then it happened.
As the clock struck midnight on the last day of 1977 and a group of young people stumbled blindly into the New Year as I had done the past three years myself, I turned my back on the party and stepped out onto a small stoop on the corner of a main street in my hometown, less than half a mile from the hospital where my first child would be born someday and breathed the fresh air of a new day.
I often feel badly for people whose only experience of the dramatic comes in a bottle or a pipe or a needle or a pill. I lived that drama till I was naked and wounded with nowhere to hide.
And I know so many people who live vicariously through books or songs or movies or cartoons as if they really know what it feels like to be free. And I love those people but I can’t lie to them.
Until you’ve stood on the precipice of extinction and looked fully into the abyss of your own failures, you’re still living a cliché founded on a lie. I wish I could take away your pain but some paths you’ve got to walk on your own.
I have a friend that lost a finger one day but it saved his soul. I lost a friend one time but it saved my life. Too many have lost so much more for so little.
My road has sorrow but it always ends in joy. Sometimes there’s even joy without the sorrow but there’s never sorrow without the joy. If you’re not on this road, isn’t it time you took the red pill?
@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr
Sometimes I marvel how quickly I burned through my first life…
When it ended I felt like a middle aged character from a Dickens novel. The big difference being that I was barely 20 years old.
As good as I was at weaving my complicated persona to cover up the fear and weakness inside me, the threads weren’t strong enough to hold it all together. And then it happened.
As the clock struck midnight on the last day of 1977 and a group of young people stumbled blindly into the New Year as I had done the past three years myself, I turned my back on the party and stepped out onto a small stoop on the corner of a main street in my hometown, less than half a mile from the hospital where my first child would be born someday and breathed the fresh air of a new day.
I often feel badly for people whose only experience of the dramatic comes in a bottle or a pipe or a needle or a pill. I lived that drama till I was naked and wounded with nowhere to hide.
And I know so many people who live vicariously through books or songs or movies or cartoons as if they really know what it feels like to be free. And I love those people but I can’t lie to them.
Until you’ve stood on the precipice of extinction and looked fully into the abyss of your own failures, you’re still living a cliché founded on a lie. I wish I could take away your pain but some paths you’ve got to walk on your own.
I have a friend that lost a finger one day but it saved his soul. I lost a friend one time but it saved my life. Too many have lost so much more for so little.
My road has sorrow but it always ends in joy. Sometimes there’s even joy without the sorrow but there’s never sorrow without the joy. If you’re not on this road, isn’t it time you took the red pill?
@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr
Thursday, February 18, 2010
DAY ONE
Hello my friends. Welcome to the first of the twelve days.
When I was a child I dreamed incredible dreams and I had incredible fears. Sometimes my fears mixed with my dreams. Maybe you know what I mean. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re still having those fretful dreams. Wherever you are and whatever you’re experiencing, I love you…and that has nothing to do with how you feel about me.
But back then I didn’t love you. I feared you…but not just you…I feared life. I feared death. I feared myself. So I said and did many things to protect myself from the fear. Maybe you did too.
How did you cope with childhood? How did you cope with friendships, school, relationships, family, growing up, becoming you? Do you remember? Do the memories hurt? Do you have shame mixed with joy? Happiness mixed with disappointment? What went right? What didn’t?
I was born in 1957, the beloved son of two wonderfully young foolish people trying on the garment of parenthood. In 1977 I died…but my body lived on. And those two wonderful parents of mine, as oblivious to me as I was to them, never knew I had passed on.
In 1978 I was born again. If you know what that means then I don’t need to say any more to you. If you don’t know what that means, then you’ll just have to find out. Stick around…who knows what might happen. Then there’s a few of you who think you know what it means but you don’t and because you think you do, you’ll never know what it really means and that’s sad…for you.
Death is an interesting phenomenon. I’m sure I don’t understand it. I hate it and I’m fascinated by it. And I hate it. And I’m drawn to it daily. But living death was much worse.
If you’ve ever done time on this earth as a shade, a wraith walking in the crack between the world that is and the world that isn’t then you know what happened to me. If you’re still living there…I don’t know what to tell you except there are two ways out and they’re both final…but they’re not both equal.
How many of our friends, our families, our brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, school chums and children (dear God we’re all just children) have moved beyond our reach forever? You may think you’re too far gone but if you’re a living dog then you’re much better than a dead lion. Think about it.
I like... no that’s not true...I LOVE the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the Red pill. Have you seen the movie? Did you like it? Did you hate it? Have you asked yourself why?
If you haven’t seen it, the hero is a seeker named Neo who is looking to find out what’s really going on in his world and what is this thing that he knows only as The Matrix. Morpheus, a person claiming to know what The Matrix really is, offers Neo two pills: one red and one blue.
The red pill is an opportunity to see ‘beyond the world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth’ and as Morpheus says “to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes”. The blue pill is the fall back position: If Neo chooses the blue pill, he can go back to sleep and forget that any of this had ever happened.
How many times have you (and I) taken the blue pill and gone back to sleep pretending all this never happened?
I’ll see you tomorrow…or I won’t…
@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr
When I was a child I dreamed incredible dreams and I had incredible fears. Sometimes my fears mixed with my dreams. Maybe you know what I mean. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re still having those fretful dreams. Wherever you are and whatever you’re experiencing, I love you…and that has nothing to do with how you feel about me.
But back then I didn’t love you. I feared you…but not just you…I feared life. I feared death. I feared myself. So I said and did many things to protect myself from the fear. Maybe you did too.
How did you cope with childhood? How did you cope with friendships, school, relationships, family, growing up, becoming you? Do you remember? Do the memories hurt? Do you have shame mixed with joy? Happiness mixed with disappointment? What went right? What didn’t?
I was born in 1957, the beloved son of two wonderfully young foolish people trying on the garment of parenthood. In 1977 I died…but my body lived on. And those two wonderful parents of mine, as oblivious to me as I was to them, never knew I had passed on.
In 1978 I was born again. If you know what that means then I don’t need to say any more to you. If you don’t know what that means, then you’ll just have to find out. Stick around…who knows what might happen. Then there’s a few of you who think you know what it means but you don’t and because you think you do, you’ll never know what it really means and that’s sad…for you.
Death is an interesting phenomenon. I’m sure I don’t understand it. I hate it and I’m fascinated by it. And I hate it. And I’m drawn to it daily. But living death was much worse.
If you’ve ever done time on this earth as a shade, a wraith walking in the crack between the world that is and the world that isn’t then you know what happened to me. If you’re still living there…I don’t know what to tell you except there are two ways out and they’re both final…but they’re not both equal.
How many of our friends, our families, our brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, school chums and children (dear God we’re all just children) have moved beyond our reach forever? You may think you’re too far gone but if you’re a living dog then you’re much better than a dead lion. Think about it.
I like... no that’s not true...I LOVE the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the Red pill. Have you seen the movie? Did you like it? Did you hate it? Have you asked yourself why?
If you haven’t seen it, the hero is a seeker named Neo who is looking to find out what’s really going on in his world and what is this thing that he knows only as The Matrix. Morpheus, a person claiming to know what The Matrix really is, offers Neo two pills: one red and one blue.
The red pill is an opportunity to see ‘beyond the world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth’ and as Morpheus says “to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes”. The blue pill is the fall back position: If Neo chooses the blue pill, he can go back to sleep and forget that any of this had ever happened.
How many times have you (and I) taken the blue pill and gone back to sleep pretending all this never happened?
I’ll see you tomorrow…or I won’t…
@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr
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