say the ancient cartographers
marking dangerous places
outside familiar territory.
Disasters befall adventurers
who dare to travel past
publicly approved comfort zones.
Green lights keep everyone safe.
Tight fences keep bad guys out.
Regulations assure and reassure.
Airport security finds hidden danger
before it grounds a plane. Our own
FDA makes sure meat, and milk are pure.
Right?
I’d rather meet Linford and Karen
at the edge of the world, and face down
the fiercest, fire breathing dragons
than live in a world where natural cob
homes are outlawed and destroyed
and their builders put behind bars,
where by the book inspectors sign off
on conventional houses that pass
but shouldn’t,
where real estate agents persuade
young married's to buy a house they
can't afford, hanging them upside down,
where raw milk from real cows
eating green grass is condemned,
and cooked honey is considered safe,
where pharmaceuticals try to corner the market
making herbal home remedies illegal, and give
doctors plenty of free, questionable samples
where the only remedy for pain
or sleeplessness is a pill, and being
disturbed or uncomfortable is intolerable.
where choices to legally homeschool
are trying to be taken away by a government
that legally let me abort life,
where pure cotton is loaded with pesticides,
and peanuts are grown in that same ground
after the damage is done,
where bleached, separated, modified, manipulated grain grown
in lifeless, weedless ground is blamed for
glucose intolerance in pasta, pastry, and bread,
where women ruin their eyesight with lash extensions,
deform their mouths with duck lip injections, and try to make
down there look like an airbrushed pubescent girl,
where women think large lumpy breasts, rump lifts, liposuction, and
facelifts are necessary for self focused happiness, and lovely brown skin
dies trying to bleach itself white.
Go ahead and cook your brains -- straighten your dyed, curly hair, watch TV until you forget how to converse, swing your marriage, don’t die of natural causes - let chemo and radiation take your last dollar and your last vista view. Throw away all your books, give up your guns, immunize your babies, get a flue shot every year, take fluoride on all fronts, soak your house in formaldehyde, let it preserve your body when you die, cover the ocean in a layer of plastic soup, melt the glaciers, buy another car, just try to poison the super duper yellow jackets, fleas, giant wasps, try to cure the lyme disease epidemic, let the government shut down, bake a turkey that lives with 20,000 others in a cesspool barn gasping for light and fresh air, eat tasteless eggs, and BBQ beef that smells like feces.
I’m feeling partly paralyzed and completely confused by what is allowed and disallowed. Approved of and not approved of. It seems all turned around crazy. We're upside down, backwards, topsy turvy, and inside out.
I want to be a dangerous expedition hungry adventurer who’s not of afraid going where there be dragons. I wish I could get ahold of one of those old maps so I knew what direction to head off toward.
I can’t, so I’m just going to follow Over the Rhine to Nowhere Farm, where they left the edges wild.
Meet Me At The Edge Of The World could start the next revival, become the latest manifesto, start the newest trend. But it won't, because most people are more afraid of dragons.
Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer prompted this crazy rant. Don't blame him.
I take full responsibility. I know this is badly written, but I am sooooooooo mad about the crazy things going on in our world. Forgive me if you want, but I'm not sorry. :)
