Dark Angel
As he passed through this commercial district the street peddlers were hawking their trinkets of bling to any who were intrigued or gullible enough to stop and listen. Jantz was on his way home to rest and give his mind its space to to its data dump of the phenomena which caught his sensory and subconscious receptors. Jantz was grizzled but not time-worn or bloated as many of his contemporaries. He had, by coincidence, been led to being dragged to this monastic-like seclusion and this ascetic discipline of 'less being more'. He was still wiry and he wore a hood covering over his head in the cooler months for warmth and to fend off head colds. His clothes were undistinguished and practical-'errand functional'.
Jantz entered a discount store to grab some cut-rate dishwashing detergent and some household cleaner so he could fabricate a cheap washing machine detergent. He came up to the queue of people noticing their individual states and demeanor. Most were in a festive mood for the holiday. A few showed an irritation which expressed itself in a scowl or a look of hurried impatience on their face, if not verbalizing sharp rebukes to their kids or to the situation at hand. Jantz also noticed their physical condition. Though most appeared to be younger than he, they were more morbidly heavier than he.
Jantz couldn't help but think of the fattened lambs being led to the existential slaughter. A vision very similar when he had been at a stockyards and saw the cattle on the trucks awaiting to be unloaded for the slaughter house. Nothing they could do. Nothing he could do for them. This was the general attitude he had towards those people of today. There was little directly he could do for them, other than through the social service agencies that provided the civic triage or hospice help to those who were in serious need. 'The poor are with us always' and having only your fingers to plug the holes appearing in a leaking dike were common convictions he held about such activity. It made the doers feel better, yet the over-all condition was worsening, socially. More people were becoming 'clients of need' because of a naivete of trust for the trends they were pursuing and emotionally consuming like an entitled existential buffet, or just from the willful indifference to their known ignorance, let alone the ignorance of consequences of that attitude.
There was little within the framework of this attitude that could be done other than marginal and minimalist efforts for the few. A mass affect was needed. But what?
The homily given to Jantz as a much younger man, who at the time thought it was more cliche than truth, 'If you want to change the world, change yourself', turned out to have more substance than he had imagined at that time. Through different experiences, Jantz had realized that the noted 'strong vibes' he gave out in the past, could be enhanced by a more healthy body vessel that was being the transmitter of those vibes. But like his philosophical foundation, he had to overcome 'coincidental' obstructions that impeded and delayed the effort he wanted to do. So he did what he could do.
While doing that, he focused on those points of mental and emotional points of intensity, aka, cognitive markers of his dimensional field of conscious and subconscious awareness, as his radar of recognition for others. Most of those recognized became metaphorical props which provided points of articulated awareness than any on-going temporal, tangible engagement. The mundane, pedestrian life became the practice field for developing those aesthetics of intensity of affecting transmissions. Beyond the interaction needed for the physiological sustenance and maintenance for his corporeal vessel, people were just incidental dimensional utilities for that end, and the rare and sublime rabbit-hole of inspiration.
Thus, Jantz existed in a time-warp between those sublime inspirations as he sought to improve his own acuity by limiting his own mental and emotional, disorganizing distractions from his sensory field. This was no small endeavor since deconstructing past knowledge and emotions inculcated over scores of years was a daily existential challenge. But this was his 'Yoga' of mental meditations of clearing the mind by having a coherent focus of intensity on the true 'imperatives'.
