Are we anesthetizing ourselves to the pressures and influence of a toxic culture, so palsied by the anesthetic that we can't crawl out? What keeps you in the wrong place? Where does the inspiration go when there is no internal audience? Who cares? Hate is the great destroyer. I know this now. I can look back at a few key experiences and say "Yes, that was where the lava started seeping in. That is the chink in the heat shield that caused the reentry disintegration." It wouldn't have mattered anyway. The haters circled like wolves, panting, salivating, hungry, relentless. They shot, their darts poisoned with their infectious bile- a brew so potent it converts its target into a monster that tears itself apart piece by piece. Now, every time I seek to reach with one of those hands for the instrument that was my soul, a useless stump wiggles pitifully. I am handless, armless- made this way by hatred. The haters sit proudly in my mind, resplendent in their joy at my impotence. They will never leave. They have captured the kingdom, staked a claim never to be refuted- they simply point to the silence as proof. So, we trudge on- day after day of blue jeans and job, car and dirt, flesh and sleep. Perhaps without the anesthetic, the wretched world will come in to such stark relief that my eyes will be burned from my skull, my ears sealed over. "If i can't sing my soul, I can only speak my mind." - John Lennon " Julia.