When things go wrong, you can run. Run as fast as you can, through brambles, pain, tears streaming from eyes. Indescribable terror and anxiety. When things go wrong however are really not that much different from when things go right. Expectation is the key. What do you expect will happen when you’re dealing with people? Insipid and mostly stupid. With gorillas? Depends right? On whom it is exactly? Filial ties mean nothing. Profound love and care, as rare as a four leaf clover (which are said to exist but I have yet to see one!), if found can make the difference. When profound love and care are present then there is no difference between when things go wrong and when things go right. For, what exactly is wrong or right? Things happen. Whether they are wrong or right are just you. Your filter on life. Your filter on things. I find a lot of derogatory tirades in the world experience today, because the flow of information is much more open for the time being. My own tirades are equally guilty of this, of a meaninglessness. I was having a conversation with someone about the idea of recompense and your due: long after the things that go wrong or right. The tangent quickly became a condemnation of the word recompense and the underlying action the verb represents. Recompense is neither good nor bad. It is like a thing that happens. It’s reception is your filter. It’s reception is you. It’s like when things go wrong and when things go right.

I could be like this flower, open myself to the world, frolic gently in a summer’s breeze with complete awareness of the catastrophe awaiting me in the dead of winter. Oh wait that’s me thinking like me. Winter will come. If I were a flower with human thought patterns and a brain I’d say winter is when something goes wrong. But the flower isn’t me nor I it.

I have been thinking about this line of thought after hearing a woman’s retelling of her near death experience and how her story connected to morality and the idea of beyond good and evil. The where of beyond morality, at least here and now and perhaps in the past also, on this planet, would take us to chaos and destruction, cold savagery. A place punctuated by severe violence between ever stretching moments of fear and terror. Call it what you will, but this thing we live in called the universe, our place, is fraught with all types things that have gone wrong and gone right. Regardless of our filter they are all here, nuzzling at the teat of the universe, the pure evil and the pure good alike. She is like Babylon welcoming all to her massive breasts, beasts and saints alike.

I await my next terror like a bracing tonic, and my next exhilarating joy like ambrosia in silent breathless reverie. Frankl would say I am making the most of a horrific experience by composing these words and texts. But horrific experience is a scale. I think my particular one at the moment is terrifying and horrific, but if I remember other’s experience’s, which I will concede are far far worst than my own, then perhaps horrific is the right word, OR it is the right word for EVERY experience. I haven’t decided because I keep getting befuddled by experience…. and horror.

Unfortunately , we cannot go back. On this planet the many will be left behind like those left behind in a decrepit old slum, faded colors like a magazine in the sun. The future is bright for some as it always is. Things will go wrong on a planet wide scale for the many. Does anyone remember the fall of the empire and how dark it was for so long? The plagues, the superstition, the pointless endless agonies and toil. Always the toil. As a matter of fact I think the consensus for all of our history across the spectrum of collectives and gatherings of peoples into civilizations, is that things mostly go wrong, in which case things going right are the exception, the outliers, not the main range of points.

Such morbid things really. That explains why there is beer and wine in this experience-well called earth. Brief respites from such horrific thoughts. Laughing into the bitters, facing the finiteness of us dead on. Ahh when things go wrong, things go right.