what do you believe in? musings in polar opposites.

i've been trying to work out an assortment of different cultural views on god lately in a place where half of the people have a spiked cross or jesus crying tattooed on random unattractive areas of their bodies and yet live by rules of everyone for themself. to me it is of course hypocritical but also very intimidating. this doublethink comes at a price: when a population is to the point where intimidation, dishonesty, and violence are common place, the only way to find any kind of moral base is to turn to religion. religion meaning, almost dominantly, some form of christianity. this means that to not believe is to not have morals. this was demonstrated to me in a man that i worked with who asked me the question "what do you believe in: yourself?" as a reaction to me telling him i didn't believe in god. i am still trying to process my response to this question because it caught me so far off guard. firstly, the question is based on the assumption that pride is the soul reason for not believing in god. under the logic of him, and so many others, god is the only route to humility and understanding. i just don't understand how that logic still has followers when clearly these believers are, as jesus would say, "puffed up". secondly, it is simply so far off my actual worldview. christianity is what tells you that you are an important creature with an important soul and an important place in the world so go ahead and shit all over it. i don't believe in myself at all, what i do believe is that when i die i'll become part of the ground and not become a god or a star system or a unicorn or something. thirdly, and this is the point i'm getting at, if i had had time to think about the question "what do you believe in" i would have responded with this: fear, peace, lonliness, friendship, oppression, equality. it seems to me that back and forth is always going to be back and forth. regardless of all the hypocracy, hostility, and bullshit, you can be happy if you realize that nothing is going to bring you peace, frienship, and equality besides your self and its relationship to the world around you.

buffalo

buffalo is this mighty
morbidly blobby
mess of misconceptions and
mistaken faces, meaning that if it were a human i wouldn't mind running into her on the street, because she'd smile and say hello and give me the unasked for time of day, and then she'd cry. it's a city they tried and tried to make safe but people continued to run from it. it's a place where race was always first, sex second, and everything else last, where respect continued to try to run at the toes of those white people and eventually gave up.
buffalo feels like the scraping shock of a crash
while it asks,
who are you?
who do you want me to be?
and people keep telling it different answers. some tell it that they want its industry to begin to blossom and make the city sexy. some say that to heal buffalo's disease can be healed when the communities inside it are moisturized to reduce fault lines of centuries-old hatred with a smile and a tip of the hat. some think that it needs to simply regurgitate what is causing the symptoms.