Hey, all--

One time, I was talking to a friend who considered herself to be a "damaged", "weird", "middle-aged" woman dealing with former high school issues of being an unfulfilled misfit. I told her, this wonderful art teacher, that she had a tremendous beauty, an undying vitalism, and "the soul of a poet". Pain purifies, and to the extent that no one who succeeded to titanic heights "would be who they were" unless they agonied away in the purgatory of struggle. I've fought long & hard. . . . . I was turned "every which way but loose" by fate, or whatever you want to call "destiny's crooked schemer".

But then I picked up the book, "The Secret" which caused a minor sensation on the Oprah program in the fall of 2006. I got on "the band-wagon" a little late, always "a bit slow on the uptake" and never one to follow silly trends like those proverbial "wild goose chases" or bird-brains of the turkey-minded pecking after "The Crackerjacks" of trendy American consciousness like morons. A book and DVD was available; since Michael considered himself a scholarly frump, he purchased up the volume while dismissing the other as "hum-bug" for those "too stupid to read a book".

The volume was a cleansing breath of "fresh air", a "pep talk" of the greatest magnitude. But something "wasn't clicking" as he waited for his life to change, like an ungraceful Nietzschian falling short at the Parthenon of destiny. A while later, partially "as a joke" just to say that "he owned one of everything" like a man carrying a raft over his head should he ever be surrounded all of a sudden "by a raging river", he picked up the DVD and visually, as cheesy and "as in bad taste" the presentation was, "the message clicked".

And it was driven home that he should write down exactly what he wanted in this life on a slip of paper, provided in the packaging of the DVD in the form of a genie asking you, "what do you desire?" and "your wish is my command!". Why, I even rubbed "a genie lamp" as a joke, another item I had bought on my travels which was actually a cruddy, cut-rate piece of junk smelted in India instead of Persia that couldn't even hold a flame.

And it was as if the universe answered. . . . . like I had slipped $20 to the band leader who then started playing "my favorite song" as I pirouetted around in ecstasy, as whimsical as a couple dancing in the cold November rain.

"The Secret" is the law of attraction, meaning that if we start behaving and acting with positive confidence and affirmation then the universe opens up to welcome us "as a force of nature" and not "a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy". And the capital tragedy of life, "being used by personally-minded men for purposes you recognize to be base".

George Benard Shaw could not have said it better. To reach, to evolve to higher and more self-aware states of consciousness and organization instead of falling to lazy entropy. Helping life in its struggle upward, to make his fellow beings something more than "the uncomfortable, false, restless, artificial, petulant, and wretched creatures they are".

-- "Lawless"
"The Bard of Richmond Heights"

Matt Furey can Help 'ya here

This author has come up with a program