Saturday, December 28, 2013

The Ocean


 
THE OCEAN

by

Anthonystjoseph

     Okay, seriously, why do some folks love to go swimming in the ocean?  The prospect of doing anything in the ocean other than looking at it escapes me.  I mean, you are swimming all up in somebody else’s HOUSE!  You do not have any idea of the real estate laws or traffic laws or even the criminal laws of the ocean…  And most of all, you don’t have any idea what the trespassing laws are.  A shark may have the right to take a bite out of you if you swim through a yellow light.  The rules are not the same down there.  Half these shark attacks may actually be legal in their world.  I’m just saying, until you can speak shark or whale you should probably stay out of their house.

     A long time ago, as a child, I went swimming in the Ocean.  In my swimming years I was raised in Minnesota so the Ocean was a new concept to me when I first saw it.  I swam out far into the Ocean and the hairs on the back of my neck came up for some reason.  I come from a family of folks with intuition and my silent alarms were GOING OFF!  I stopped and started floating in the water wondering what I was feeling…  My psychic sensors were telling me to listen closely.  I swam to the bottom like I did in the lakes of Minnesota, you know, to touch it… UN HUH! I swam back up to the top and then my alarms went off BIG TIME!  I looked out to the oceans horizon, and then I looked back at the shore and they looked the same!  WHERE WAS I!  Luckily, I could see the buildings after rubbing my eyes.  Then I heard this music, it was going, ‘DUNT DUNT; DUNT DUNT’!

     Oh LORD! I was thinking ‘what have you got yo dumb ass into this time you STUPID NEGRO!  Do you do that?  When you get yourself into trouble, you just start degrading yourself!  Becoming your own bully!  I said to myself in what felt like the middle of the ocean or I should say the middle of nowhere, “You ALWAYS do STUPID SHIT like this and you CONSTANTLY F*CK THINGS UP!  Sometimes I’m really hard on myself…

     Anyway, the whole time I’m berating myself and then quieting myself to listen to the music and make sure I’m hearing right; that whole time, I am swimming like a runaway slave alongside Harriet Tubman with the dogs on one side and William Still on the other!  I get to the shore and I’m doing that kind of running where you put your body first and your limbs second so the only thing they’ll get is a limb, HOPEFULLY!

     A year or two later I was watching this new movie ‘Jaws’ in the theater and then this music came on, “DUNT DUNT!”  I SCREAMED, “THAT’S THAT MUSIC!”

By

Anthonystjoseph

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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The Santa Clause




THE SANTA CLAUSE

by

Anthonystjoseph

I look at your lips

Like two floating ships

Ships with true anchors

Sunk in the land of no lies

Your ships sail beneath

My parent’s eyes

Your ships always tell me

I speak nothing but true

My ships are the ones

With no lies for you

Follow my ships

You always say

My ships are the ones

That won’t lead you astray

As a child, your ships

Told me the laws

Your ships told me there was a Santa Clause

I believed you when told

And then I got old

Your ships had lied

They pushed true aside

I remember your ships

The same ones of the Clause

They are the ships

Who said God makes the laws

Which true is true

I cannot know

Once your ships tell me lies

I must see with my eyes

I may have to pause

The stuff ‘bout God’s laws

So please don’t tell my kids

About Santa Clause

By

Anthonystjoseph

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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Tamika & The Mennonite Shepherd


 

TAMIKA &THE MENNONITE SHEPHERD

by

Anthonystjoseph  

     Now I’m going to start this one with comedy and finish with some love from God and you better read it all.  If you think you’re just going to come in here and get the comedy and then run off, you’re WRONG!  I will come on you like a thief in the night so you best read all of it!

     I just recently had a run in with TAMIKA!  Now if you don’t know Tamika, let me introduce you to her.  You know Tamika; she’s the kind of girl with thighs that take turns occupying the same airspace and fight each other for real estate.  She generally comes with a lollipop in her mouth and a hair attachment that’s impeccably in place because she’s GOT THAT part of life DOWN!  Normally she rolls in flip flops and cut off shorts but during the winter she wears a dress to keep warm.  Tamika’s other accessories are three to four kids usually scattered in a hundred yard radius to which she shouts at occasionally to put something down unless they plan on getting a job to pay for it.  She never misses a beat sucking on her lollipop, I imagine she’s keeping certain muscles ready for later performances.

     Tamika’s the kind of sister that will walk right up to a brother and give him the once over taking your clothes off with her eyes while kicking the kid to the side and taking the lollipop out of her mouth and saying things like, “You sho’ is fine!  Boy, you know what I would do to you, HMMP!  SHIRLEY! (Summoning her friend) Come on over and look at THIS!”  “What’s your name sweety?”  I timidly respond Tony and pray she doesn’t beat my ass if I don’t respond properly.  Don’t laugh, it’s happened.  

     Well I just had this Tamika call me from the front desk of my current hotel and come out of her skin on me over the phone.  I had just paid for my hotel and Tamika in her attention to details forgot to tell her computer.  So I am awakened by Tamika who calls me on the hotel phone in my room saying, “Check out is at eleven!”.  I can almost hear her neck swiveling through the phone as if I’m one of her deadbeat dads who is behind on her child support check…  I explain to her that this is the guy who just paid her two hours ago and she says, “Oh, my bad.”  That’s TAMIKA…  Now you know her.

     Well if you read my stories you know that I like to experience different churches and you also would know that I recently received an invitation to visit a Mennonite Church.  Well I jumped on the invitation and almost couldn’t wait for the day.  From my limited understanding, the Mennonites were an offshoot of the Amish people so I didn’t know what to expect.  A client of mine had invited me and said that he wasn’t even Mennonite but the first time he attended the church it just had so much love and the members made him feel so welcome.  I think a welcoming and warm atmosphere is the only thing you can ask for in regards to a church so I was definitely going.

     The church was about thirty miles from my hotel and the directions were very simple from the client.  On my way using the simple directions I had, I drove past a regular looking church that I had gone by before with the same advertisement as before on the marquis announcing ‘vacation’ bible school.  I turned down the road that I was told to turn down and started to look for what I thought a Mennonite church would look like.  I figured it would probably be a very rural looking building with possibly a few horse and buggies outside.  I really had no idea what to look for.  I should have used Google on this outing.  After three miles my inner voice said I had gone too far based on the directions I had received from my client.  I stopped to ask a farmer for directions.

     The one thing that I have learned about people who live in small towns is that they will all give you directions at any time, but they will also take their own sweet time and offer all other bits of information they feel like sharing that day.  I pulled over and stuck my head out the window and asked this farmer I saw for directions to the Mennonite Church.  He stuck his hand in the air like he was pushing a ‘pause’ button on ‘time’ itself, as in saying, hold on, and started towards my car (just point me in the right way old man, I’m running late for church, as usual).  It was at this point that I realized these people probably don’t get that many visitors so company was deeply appreciated.  They also don’t use street signs very often in the country (it’s always like, ‘turn right at the big tree with the limb shaped like a fishing pole hauling in a huge tire, you can’t miss it’, and then ‘turn left at the Piggly Wiggly’… --grant me serenity because I want to strangle this man).  When he gets close enough to my car, I inform him that I was INVITED to the Mennonite Church.  I don’t want him to report me to the State Patrol I just drove past.  He looks at my license plate and says, “Ya’ come all the way from Col-a-RADA’”.  I just laughed a little and repeated my needs.  He says, “Well, you go back to the switchback” WTF!  What in God’s map of maps is a switchback?  I didn’t ask, my memories of switches is not good. “Then turn left at the blinking lights” OMG!  I do know what a blinking light is though, he means the stoplight.  “Then make a left and you can’t miss it.  It’s the stone building.”  This is the church that I drove past earlier with the ‘vacation’ bible school sign.  Great, late for church again!

     I get to the church and hear singing and go to the front door and its LOCKED!  NOT AGAIN!  I think of a side door and go around and it’s open, thank GOD!  A brother does not want to be locked out of CHURCH!  I am greeted by the friendliest usher and informed him that I am a guest of the Whiteley’s’, I don’t want any trouble.  I find a seat in the back and sit down.  The singing is a little above bland but definitely better than the Methodist church from the week before.  I see Mr. Whiteley and he sends me a kind smile over the pews.  Later, I’m not sure if it was my imagination or did the usher hold tight on to the collection plate when it was passed to me and release it to the person after me as if I was going to bolt for the door with the day’s collections…  I don’t think I imagined that at all.

     The church was just a normal church with no horse and buggies or burning of the pigs or anything out of the ordinary like I was expecting.  Note to self, got to use Google more often. The pastor at this church gave an amazing sermon that was insightful and helpful and very adept at helping his flock to grow in the right direction.  I learned that the word ‘Sin’ in Greek means to miss the mark.  I was very moved by the sermon as a whole and was very grateful to God for leading me to this church at this time.  I was so moved that I wanted to personally thank the pastor for his service that seemed to speak directly to me.  At the end of the service I stood up when the microphone was being passed around for anyone who wanted to say something and I told the crowd what I had intended to tell the pastor as I left.  I informed them over the microphone that in my travels I go to lots of churches and then went on to tell them this:  I said,

“There are those that want to be shepherds. 

There are those that choose to be shepherds.

There are those that are chosen to be shepherds.

And then there are those like your Pastor Conn who ARE shepherds.”

I then thanked him for his great sermon and the Whiteley’s invitation to visit their church.  When the service was over almost everyone in the church had a desire to come and meet this stranger with the kind words and even some of the kids seemed to be enamored with me.  It was the most rewarding church service I’ve been to in a long time.  I felt thankful and on the right path of God when leaving the church that day.  Pastor Conn was truly a man close to God and fully invested in sharing the wealth.

     As I walked out of the church I saw Tamika!  She had been sitting in the front row with all three kids and had even left the flip flops and cut offs at home.  She still had the crinkle braids with the blond streaks but she didn’t look threatening at all, she had found GOD, thank the Lord!  We were safe.

By

Anthonystjoseph

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Friday, December 13, 2013

I Hate Weakness (I Love You)



 
I HATE WEAKNESS

(I Love You)

by

Anthonystjoseph


     As a person whose personal goal is to ‘become’, I should never use the word ‘hate’.  In using the term ‘become’, I am referring to the widely held belief that one can evolve into something more spiritual and righteous than some choose, and a lot more than the horrible creatures that walk around in the guise of the human body pretending to be nice.  Some people just make you sit back and say to yourself, ‘What kind of piece of shit human is this?  And what kind of idiotic parents, or system, let this person believe that they can operate this way.’  I and others like to refer to these children of the universe as ‘other people’s kids’.  In not wanting to use the word hate, or more importantly becoming a person who doesn’t use or feel the word, I find my greatest enemy to achieving this task is weakness.  I am not talking about my weakness, which is arguably at stake here, in not being able to eliminate the word ‘hate’ or it’s feeling from my being; I am talking about other folk’s weakness and the bile that it almost draws from my innards when I see blatant, outrageous, pure, cowardly, openly, and undeniable weakness.  I HATE IT! 

     I think this ‘extreme dislike’ I have for weakness developed at a young age since I had to learn to be strong from almost day one.  I was both cursed and blessed, since you just can’t get a blessing without a curse or a curse without a blessing, with a single mother to raise me alone.  My mother was always manifesting her nature as frail or naïve and this constantly made people feel that they could take advantage of her.  As a young child I would have to snap on my holster and deal with all sorts of people who thought they were going to get over on my mama…  She just loved to see me whip out my holster and defend her so it started to seem like she encouraged others to take advantage of her just so she could see my dog and pony act.  As little Anthonystjoseph, I was known as a terror and still have posters of me up in certain parts of the country that were privileged to some incident where someone tried to take advantage of my mother.  The Audi dealership in Scottsdale, Arizona, is still paying for that service writer’s therapy after he tried to bilk my mother for her savings to repair that old Audi.  I remember him babbling when we left, “That kid is an asshole!  Did you hear what he said to me?” Yeah, maybe so…  But he didn’t rip off my mama without hearing from me and my verbal holster.  My mother was never prouder than to see her little son defending her against the so called ‘stronger’ of the world.

     After dealing with various people and neighbors constantly trying to take advantage of my mother and walk over her ‘supposed’ niceness, I would turn my disenchantment to her.  How could she let someone blatantly lie to her and take advantage of her? I became angrier and angrier at these incidents as time went by.  At the age of twelve years old I had to call her at work at the airport and have her take the call at the ticket counter while I lost my mind on the phone explaining that I was going over to the neighbor’s house and demand her bedroom television back.  My mother, in her ‘niceness’ and need to be loved; which we all have, loaned her bedroom television to the neighbor because their television needed to be repaired.  This is completely acceptable and very neighborly and something I did not have a problem with.  What I did have a problem with was the fact that I was walking along on the top of my brick backyard fence as young boys do and saw my mother’s bedroom television in the neighbor’s ten year old son’s bedroom while he was sleeping to cartoons.  They had the old living room television repaired and then got another one for the parent’s bedroom and then put my MOTHER’S TELEVISION in little SAMMY’s room.  Oh hell NO!  My mother loved to go to sleep on her television and had never slept without one on and they don’t feel the need to return HER television but decide to put it in their KIDS room.  WHERE’S MY HOLSTER!  Thirty minutes later I was carrying that television out of their house while I huffed and I puffed.  I could not believe that my mother let these people just take advantage of her ‘kindness’.  Kindness is mistaken for weakness for a reason.  When you let someone abuse your kindness then you have approached and landed in the land of weakness.

     The reason this topic is coming up now is due to an extreme display of weakness on a man’s part that I happened to personally witness and be subjected to in my adult life.  This man was a client of mine who negotiated a roof replacement and apparently entered the negotiations without informing me that he was borrowing his wife’s pants to do the negotiations.  There I was standing in the Chipotle line waiting on my evening chicken bowl when I got a call from this Casper Milk Toast of a husband who was calling me at his wife’s request.  She was now home.  I had had dealings with the husband for three weeks at that point and everything had been wonderful.  At the time of the Chipotle call I had just left his house and counseled and ministered with him for over an hour because he had just quit his job.  Earlier his wife had upset him and apparently yelled at him on the phone after he told her he quit because she said jobs weren’t hard to come by these days; fair enough.  The husband and I had talked about everything happening for a reason and how something good was going to come out of it and all the good things you say to someone who is facing times of upheaval and change.  We had parted with a man hug.

     So, as I stand in the Chipotle line and ponder whether I am going to have sour cream on my chicken bowl, my phone rings, and its Casper, the husband, who is speaking words in regards to the roofing project that I can hear his wife in the background telling him to say to me over the phone.  Not only does his weakness allow him to be subjected to this woman who is raging because he made a choice to quit HIS job but this same weakness doesn’t allow him to correct her or tell her decisions HE made.  He finally tucks his balls in his pocket and hands her, the boss, the phone.  She then proceeds to take her misplaced anger, at him quitting his job, out on me.  I politely say to her, while I wish I could grab this woman by the neck, that I don’t understand her frustration; by the way, the insurance company is paying for the storm damaged roof to be replaced, not them.  She proceeds to tell me that the shingles were delivered a day late and no one called her.  We had had rain and the threat of snow for a week, so a delay of one day for a shingle delivery was sometimes expected and explained.  My company was a stellar company.  Due to the hail storm that had attacked Colorado there were several storm chasing companies there that left people without a roof for months after going under contract for a new roof.  She was lucky our company was doing her roof.  I would have gladly canceled her contract two days prior if I had known she was the monster that she had revealed herself to be.  Also, I would never have allowed her husband to do the business end if I had known that she wore the pants and had a holster with his name on the bullets marked for humiliation and fun.  The man I talked too earlier in the home that day was not the weak nut-less pansy I listened to while he dribbled into the phone as she berated him in the background.  Why would you be married to someone who is into humiliating and defaming your choices and your abilities to make choices?  Because of weakness, that’s why. 

     The first person that I ever fell in love with was a woman named Tammy who would cut your fingers off (true story) for doing her wrong and would want to blow your brains out for messing over her people; I was one of her people.  She was pure strength.  I loved her and her strength.  You might say that she sounds like the horrible wife previously mentioned but you would be wrong.  Tammy was a sweet person who was sweet to you until you wronged her or took her kindness for weakness.  The horrible ball breaking wife character I was dealing with here was displaying weakness in not accepting that she was angry at her husband over him quitting his job and decided to ‘act’ like she was mad at me and my company for not delivering shingles on time when everyone knows it rained that week.  It is weakness that causes most of the problems in our world in my opinion.  Weakness allows perverts, criminals, sociopaths, drug addicts, etc… to do the various acts against mankind that they do and weakness that allows us to let them get away with it.  It is weakness that enables us to let bullies take advantage of us and decide to not cause a scene and just say, “Karma will get them.”

     Well my middle name is Karma and I will cause a scene, stand strong with strength, and deal with you right then with my verbal holsters cocked and ready.  I got to the bank the other day five minutes before they opened and the doors weren’t unlocked yet.  I stand there and converse with an elderly gentleman and another guy while we wait on the bank to open.  After a while a young woman walks up and says to the elderly gentleman and me, “They’re not open yet.”  “Nope”, we responded.  Then the teller comes to open the door to the bank and the young woman breezes right past the three of us who have been waiting.  GET MY KIDS HOME.  GET MY KIDS HOME!  I cannot believe she is going to do this…  Maybe she’s going to the loan department or something.  I watched, jaw dropped, as she walked right up to the teller line and proceeded to totally discount myself and the other gentlemen’s presence…  Where’s my holster. 

     I let her have it!  I proceeded to tell her in front of the whole entire bank, “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE GOING TO DO THAT!”  To which she replied, “Well, you guys let me walk in the door first.”  Serenity now, serenity now...  I had waited and let the elderly gentlemen walk in before me because he was old.  The teller who opened the door later described the girl’s entrance, as we discussed the incident later, as a ‘whoosh’ that came through the door.  I then informed the self entitled woman from hell in front of everyone at the bank that she was an “asshole!”  I noticed as she was leaving that she was carrying the biography of POPE JOHN PAUL!  She needed to ‘be’ the book and not ‘read’ the book!

     So I hate weak people who can’t stand up for themselves and I hate weak people who let people walk all over them and I hate weak people who let their basic human needs and wants disregard others and I hate the fact that I let weak people get to me and I hate that I still can’t get past the feeling of hate!  DON’T SAY IT!

     So how do I hate weakness which is a trait of humans who I claim to love as much as I love life and just being?  How do I love the weakness in others when at times every single person can and will display this weakness?  The answer is easy.  I love humans and all humans are weak, therefore I love weak humans.  I think at this point, I must say that it is weakness that makes humans so lovable.  It is weakness that makes us pine for lost love and write a beautiful song.  It is weakness and longing for a lost memory that help us to paint beautiful memories from our past.  It is weakness that helps humans to love someone almost unconditionally and commit extreme acts of unselfishness.  It is weakness that sometimes helps humans to reveal their hearts and deepest feelings.  It is weakness that lets human passion get the best of them and reveal the sincerest forms of human expression and emotion.  It is weakness that is the most lovable quality of humans.  I think I love weakness now that I think about it.  Who am I, you ask?  I am a visitor.

By

Anthonystjoseph

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