{"id":1677,"date":"2009-10-10T06:40:07","date_gmt":"2009-10-10T04:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=1677"},"modified":"2010-01-22T21:51:25","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T19:51:25","slug":"ash-wednesday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=1677","title":{"rendered":"Ash Wednesday<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Romulus Balkan (Romania)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Translated from Romanian by the author<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Edited by Robert Fenhagen<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The dog lying in the corner is howling an oddly melodic canine serenade.<\/p>\n

I look down at my beer mug, and watch a fly struggling in it, and wonder if its drowning,\u00a0or will it die with a smile on its face?<\/p>\n

Will I?<\/p>\n

That is the problem with my mind.<\/p>\n

I am obsessing about everything today.<\/p>\n

Life, death; will the pygmies survive after their habitat was disturbed by Europeans?<\/p>\n

My mind whirls and churns.<\/p>\n

I feel concerned, but I also feel insane.<\/p>\n

I hate the Goya reproduction that I\u2019m gazing at and running my finger around the frame. It vaguely shows cedar smoke, so maybe it is about a smokehouse, but I begin to think that Goya lives, so I\u2019ll worry about that for a while.\u00a0 I don\u2019t hate Goya; I simply don\u2019t know him.<\/p>\n

I am a writer.<\/p>\n

I believe that a true writer worry about everything or perhaps that is a person, who gains pleasure out of being miserable\u2014I do not know, nor, do I care.<\/p>\n

I am a writer, I worry, and I live in a big city, which gives me a lot of grist for my worrying.<\/p>\n

A lone wolf, I thrive on images of isolation and doubt.<\/p>\n

A lone wolf is apt to die because of isolation.\u00a0 Wolves, like humans, are social creatures, and need the interaction of their kind to live.<\/p>\n

My mind allows me to be free, but I worry.<\/p>\n

My friend is a writer like me.\u00a0 Sometimes, he comes to my tiny apartment, and we reject the publishing houses that have rejected me.<\/p>\n

He is a true friend, and knows I must be pro-active in the rejection game, or else I might feel the hurt and disappointments.<\/p>\n

I do not really need them; they really need me.<\/p>\n

I am a lone wolf, and I fool myself a lot.<\/p>\n

I know absolutely that I must show my work to others.<\/p>\n

A farmer must farm to continue to learn how to farm<\/p>\n

A sheepherder has to herd sheep, so they may refine the herding business\u2014sheep welcome.<\/p>\n

I believe that God allowed us varied careers and occupations, so that we might teach a little bit of our world to others, hence, expanding and expounding on the human experience, which, as many see it, is His doing in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cPharisee!\u00a0 Get out of the temple!\u201d\u00a0 yells my friend, as he tries to convince me to get out of my apartment, and go for a walk.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, God is such a huge entity that it is impossible to find his true core; his true meaning\u2014he is simply too great, too big.<\/p>\n

He is Big Man in the Universe.\u00a0 God is great, right\u2026?<\/p>\n

No matter how long, or hard one searches, one cannot truly discover the true meaning and core of God.<\/p>\n

\u00a0My Heavens!<\/p>\n

Reason excludes God, I think.<\/p>\n

If I believe in faith without proof is Right, then, should we not doubt HIM, as well as ourselves?<\/p>\n

God is alive, but where is HE?<\/p>\n

Is He in my mind, in my heart, in the Earth, in the Universe?<\/p>\n

Where is that gigantic scamp?\u00a0 He loves to play Hide and go Seek, doesn\u2019t HE?<\/p>\n

If I am a lone wolf, and if I am unemployed, and if I have only one friend to support my quests, then I probably do not eat adequately, so my blood sugar has dropped, so I may not be thinking clearly, so is this the time to assume that I know anything about anything?<\/p>\n

God is the ultimate, and man is the ultimate of God\u2019s creations\u2014the highest form of evolution.<\/p>\n

Does that mean I am a Darwinist, as opposed to a Creationist?<\/p>\n

No, I do not portend to understand everything, and at this point, my stomach is empty, so I can assume nothing, but I can ignore even less.<\/p>\n

If God provided me a crumb, should I ignore it, or should I feel gratitude?\u00a0 Should I eat it?<\/p>\n

I think so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

God is the ultimate, all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, so why am I\u00a0 here writing about God, with a lowered blood pressure due to lack of a meal?<\/p>\n

Hey, God, what am I? Yesterday\u2019s stew?<\/p>\n

I feel a headache coming on, which is fine as I was thinking that it would be fine to put out my cigarette on the back of a Bengalese tiger, so it\u2019s possible that a headache saved my life.<\/p>\n

God does work in mysterious ways.<\/p>\n

As my headache increase, I feel the Hell of the human experience; its creative vortex; its creative energy expended in greed.\u00a0 What a nightmare; what a headache.<\/p>\n

Soon, we\u2019ll leave to go over to my friend\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we\u2019ll travel through mountains singing songs that we learned from Sheppard\u2019s that were herding sheep.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we will walk along a path that cuts through a farmer\u2019s land\u2014land on which he grows food.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As we were walking into his tiny home, we ceased talking, as if we\u2019d made a previous pact.<\/p>\n

We hadn\u2019t, but we decided to go to sleep\u2014he on two armchairs, and me on an old, rusted camp bed.<\/p>\n

That night, I dreamt of rats.<\/p>\n

The next morning, I found my friend dead on the camp bed.<\/p>\n

I think I may have lost my mind for a while, because I went searching for an angel to clip his wings, pour powdered ember on them, and witness either their regeneration, or their suffering.<\/p>\n

It was a sunny Wednesday, with sick, gray sun in the sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Romulus Balkan (Romania) Translated from Romanian by the author \u00a0Edited by Robert Fenhagen\u00a0 \u00a0 The dog lying in the corner is howling an oddly melodic canine serenade. I look down at my beer mug, and watch a fly struggling in it, and wonder if its drowning,\u00a0or will it die with a smile on its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[310,22],"tags":[1131,1123,369,1116,312],"class_list":["post-1677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-24","category-short-story","tag-egophobia-24","tag-english","tag-romulus-balkan","tag-short-story","tag-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-r3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1677"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3469,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions\/3469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}