Remember when you scraped your knee as a kid? Hit the 'not so funny' bone on your elbow as an adolescent? Delivered a paper cut to your finger as an adult? Had your heart broken, like blind sided shattered, not the type of break when you keep taking back the same waste of time that you should have kept in your rear view mirror? Have you ever been attracted to someone because you idolized how they treated you and then you pulled back the blinders and saw that they treated everyone like that? You felt like your world was collapsing in all around you when all you were doing was crumbling, crumbling into a place between pleasure and pain, breaking into the realization that you were not as special as you thought you were. We have become beings of habit, creatures of repeats, unoriginal copycats, dissatisfied beings - once human now robotic, constantly upgrading, constantly updating, constantly plugged in, constantly constanting, forgetting about the one thing, the one variable, the one constant, that makes all of us equal and puts all of us on an somewhat level playing field, at least for now - that entity being - time. The gaping ravine. The thinning void that gets smaller and smaller with each passing day. The black abysmal line pulsates as it pulls the red apart, the red that keeps us bathed in blood red stasis. Is it moving in the corner of your eye or are you moving in the corner of its eye? If you stare long enough, or ignore it, you might get your answer. Try not to look and see if you can see it. If you are brave, try to look and see if you cannot see it. We let the clock chase us to bed and wake us up but rarely do we let it bring us back together to the place where our memories used to be. The nostalgia. The line in the sand. The edge of the cliffside. Cutting our skin, tearing our clothes away until nothing remains but bare skin and bones. For those that do meet at that specific hitching post in time and space, it's the same stories and the same traditions they constantly remember and store in their memories, the legends that live long in their hearts and bring them joy until the day they die, telling the same repeated stories, meal after meal, month after month, year after year, holiday after holiday, with the same joy as the first time they experienced them and felt the need to share it. There's an inherent power in that ability - to find solace in certain memories, certain stories, life experiences, and allow them to erase the painful ones, the ones that we allow to take up the most storage space in our brain. Cntrl + Alt + Del > don't stare for too long at the lines that exist to the right of this very passage. They pulsate with life. Something we used to know and do with little effort. For some of us, the same stories get old and we want to create new ones. For some of us, the new stories are not nostalgic and we want to get back to the old ones. For some of us, the same stories aggravate us and we huff air out of our mouths and roll our clouded eyes with bored persuasion when that person starts to tell those precious memories, us knowing that a couple of family folklores and periodic parables was bound to exit someone's mouth before long since everyone was under the same roof for the first time in 'however long'. For some of us, the storytellers no longer walk this worn out earth of ours, and our hearts start to miss their eyewitness renditions of what actually happened and not our cheapened version of 'do you remember when'. The red. The black. Oblivion is closer than you think it is. You think, it's right around the corner, and I think, my dear, it's closer than that! How many scars can a soul actually survive and don't say a lot. That's too generic for me to believe anymore. Quit perverting every scripture known to man and twisting it to fit your wants and not our needs. For once, I want something definitive. I want an answer. Not another question. Not another lie. Not another statement. Not another word. I crave the definitive! Have you ever watched the tiny pebbles of sands in an hourglass, slowly falling to their death until the one holding the instrument decides to turn it back over again. Counting the chaos around us, the lines just moved yet again. Don't stare too long into the black viscosity. Remedy this! Heal me! Bandage the wrists that makes the us, US! The sad batteries of the clocks that we majestically hang slowly die with each tick... tick. tick.. tick... draining its life with each passing day until they are yanked from their temporary home, recycled, and replaced by another, us only glancing at them a couple of times during the day when we wanted to know how close our lunch break was or when it was time for us to clock out for the day or take our 'however many' bathroom breaks so we could privately check our phone. The batteries fueled these devices with their life blood while we sat on a toilet or stood in front of a urinal and scrolled on our social media accounts. How many of us feel like those batteries? The hanging clocks silently scream for us to pound them into eternity with the heaviest sledgehammer we can find, yet, instead, we hang them up and crucify their existence with sharp, hesitant glances, the changing of seasons, the days of dust, naked to our eyes, only taking them down if their life source fails them or it is time to spring forward or fall back or if they are no longer accurate. Time chases us, and all we can do is just... .. . watch the watch... .. . or launch another satellite... .. . or turn our eyes in the opposite direciton as long as we are not the ones who are in current suffering. The red lines are not bashful about you seeing them for what they are. They have been moving this entire time. Why hide the rage? The world has cheapened the meaning of a second. The world has mistreated the magnitude of a minute. The world has whored out the wholesomeness of an hour. But we will not let them anymore because this is Our Hour, by God! Moment to moment, we check the time. Month to month, we mark the calendar with X's and look forward to another predestined point in time that will merely be another X before long. Monday can toast in hell as long as we have a birthday party two Saturdays, away, right? We burn calendars like we used to burn books, like we used to burn bodies, when we used to burn fires to just keep warm and cook food and stare into while reflecting on our souls and wondering about our destined existence for once, unplugged and unashamed. The red. The black. The edge. The lines. The place where unknowns meet. The years, oh my God, the years, how many have passed us and we act like it surprises us when it was, what, five, ten, almost twenty years ago and we claim to one another that "it seems like yesterday..." What have we become? "it seems like yesterday..." turns into "it seems like tomorrow..." turns into "it seems like forever ago..." turns into "I can't remember the last time..." The time is not now. That is a lie! The time was yesterday. The time was the day before that. How long will it take us to realize that considering the future is not a guarantee? Red turns to black turns back to red and reverberates the ground. The future is merely a lease with a high interest rate of how long will your heart truly keep pumping regardless of the scratches, the cuts, the breaks, the tiredness, the longing, the sadness, the happiness, the life, the death, the in-between, the dreams, the nightmares, the dark, and the light. We have trained ourselves to seduce someone else and, truth is, as time continues to tick, we need to be seducing our own selves first, then, and only then, share that power with someone else after we have mastered it. We all want light when the dark has become too dark then abandon the absolute when we get bored and feel like dipping our toes into something that is void of everything so we do not have to feel something for a minute or two. Endless see-saws... .. Time. .. Our Hour... If you cannot keep a promise to yourself, how do you expect to keep a promise to someone else? If you cannot value your own life, how can you expect to value someone else's life? When my watch finally dies, do I really want to revive it out of habit by replacing the batteries or do I let the thief suffer for a while like it has done to me for years on end by counting down the days to when, I, you, we all become ghosts and finally get our chance to haunt it back like it has done to us since our very conception? Maybe the battery does not want to fuel the clock anymore. Maybe that battery wants to store it's potential energy and be used in a better way - like a kid's toy - and not fuel a mechanism that haunts us humans every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day, of every week, of every month, of every year, of every decade, of our lives. Like I have already told you - the time is not now. The time was yesterday. Don't forget that! Ever! Time hates when we make it stand still, but sees fit to make sure that we do in its wake, and we can freeze it more often than you think, if your mind is open to that concept. We already have cemented it in its very tracks. Just now. Me and you. Take back your life from the black marketeers that lie in wait around every blind corner. The time was yesterday. One day you will believe me. The lines. The edge. The black. The red. This is... .. Our Hour.
“Going to the edge and back, one word at a time.”
Vernon Herring
I will be taking a short sabbatical from blogging to work on my first, new, short film project.
Things I will disclose about the film : it will be a narrative, the scenes will be shot in black and white, and it will hopefully be fifteen minutes or less, no guarantees.
I do not know which platform I will post the finished product to as of yet, but I will post updates and links on my Instagram account (vernon.herring), this website, and my podcast channel.
Spotify, Google, Apple, Overcast, Anchor, other podcast platforms : search ‘vernontalks‘
Feel free to reference my website to anyone who is looking for free, original reads.
Not one post is the same, and the scripts are endless!
Here’s some free ear candy to leave you with…
…wish me luck!
THE PAST (ALMOST) TWO YEARS OF BLOGGING :
vernonwrites 
That was great. Enjoy it. Can’t wait to see the film. You are so talented. I’m glad you are doing what you love. Love you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you. I’m glad you liked it.
I will try my best.
That’s the only way to live.
Love you.
LikeLike