“‘Scuse me while I touch the sky!” Gonna find out if these Superman vitamins I’ve been taking really work. Nope. Jimi Hendrix got it wrong when he sang that line at Woodstock in 1969. You can’t touch the sky. But the sky can touch you.

And the sky mauled me good on my recent 5-state tour. Soaked me with rain, pelted me with hail, buffeted me with headwinds, but then caressed me with wonder on some spectacular nights. Did you know that if you lay on the grass in the dark looking up at the universe long enough, the stars will change into a message just for you? They don’t really change, but you change as you focus on their splendor. You start to decode the spangled patterns that spiral with faerie luminescence across the cosmos. How obvious it seems when you read the calmness of Time and the reassurance of Infinity that you somehow keep missing right there where they’ve always been during your mortal dance.

I suppose it’s like finding maji and unicorns in cloud formations during the day, except that midnight is thinner somehow, more subtle and nuanced. You can literally connect the dots of galaxies and red giants scattered through the diaphanous ether. Just surrender your mind – your soul – and The Hand behind the curtain moves you over an alphabet of stars like a Ouija board. So, what did my message say?

Sorry. A secret. Written in runes and shibboleths that have meaning only to me. But you have your secret message written in star-script, too. Very special, and something you’ve always known in your heart of hearts. Nothing like the zodiac or the myths created by cultural groupthink over millennia. Your message is your truth. If you could free yourself from all the hypocrisies of the world, the deceits and double standards that embalm you day by day, year by year, as society does its mad dance of manipulation and manias, you would be left with your truth.

That said, if you share a message with the mate you make privy to your most vulnerable, passionate, uninhibited, intimate moments, it will reinforce the bonds. It’s just that simple! I run into so many people who are desperate for that kind of relief, physically and emotionally. They’ve shrunk-wrapped themselves into a relationship without magic – sedentary, fallow, dull. And the answer for them is right there. Break the rules! Lead that predictable person at the wrong time to the wrong place and let the two of you make it right.

Me, I think I’m one of Mom Nature’s UNsuccesses – the wrong person at the right time or the right person at the wrong time. Call me Mr. Mutation. We are all mutations, actually. It’s just that ol’ thing known as Natural Selection favoring some of us because our characteristics suit the current environment and not favoring others. I don’t mean the physical environment. I mean the psychological, emotional and social environments. So maybe I should scotch the terms Nature and Natural Selection and call it Social Selection or Cultural Selection – oops, those terms are taken! Well…no problemo. Let’s just call it Agenda Selection.

AGENDA SELECTION: the tenor and tone of our times, distorted and spread by mass-fast communication technology.

That’s what allows so many of us to take physical survival for granted and shape our lives increasingly around the pressures, opinions, trends, shifting values, intimidations and psychological stresses that surround us. Since the 60s, our sharply divided camps have intensified over politics, religions, lifestyles and ideologies. Traditional survival units like marriage and family are under constant revision or abandonment. People commit suicide over bullying, public shaming and psychological trauma in far greater numbers than ever before. Globalism – the premise of my first published novel – has bumped up hard on the very concept of self-determination for both nations and individuals. I could go off on any one of those topics, but let me return to the original point: I do not fit these times. I do not suit the current emotional and psychological environment. I am one of Agenda Selection’s unsuccesses, as out of sync with today’s convoluted thinking as a blind bird trying to fly by its sense of smell.

To one degree or another, you probably are too. It’s another way of saying that we are polarized as a society. Even if you wanted to avoid that by taking the most open-minded stance possible, trying to accept everything, understanding and empathizing with everything, embracing every conjugation of diversity whether sexual, cultural, racial, religious, physical and so on, then you’d still have to be against everyone you perceive as not on the same page of what you embrace. It’s why we’ve become a Tower of Babel, a Chinese fire drill (politically incorrect term if you don’t separate it from its origins) revising language to the point of paralyzing communication, normalizing clinical delusions, revising history, revising everything until each of us finds our own ox gored and we are forced to take a stand for self-preservation. At some point a society can become unworthy of its own survival. Then it collapses and dies, replaced by whichever oppressive power block can fill the vacuum, usually by force.

Oh. Wait a minute. Isn’t that what we have now…minus the last step?

Something to think about. I’ve thought about it since the slow slide on the slippery slope began, for better and worse, in the 60s. It’s fascinated me with its unexpected nuances, hopeful reverses, and unintended consequences. A lot of agenda mutations have occurred since then. Generations indoctrinated through education and media, again for better or for worse. But we are on the cusp of systemic changes now, a devaluing perhaps of what was once called “American exceptionalism.” Exceptionalism now comes under the rubric of dog whistle terms, as when New York’s Mayor de Blasio recently took under consideration a ban on educational programs for the talented and gifted, calling the concept of providing for the exceptional as racist.

Whether you consider that good or bad, the shift from equality of opportunity as an ideal to equality of outcomes is now fully entrenched in the bureaucracy, once more for better or for worse. The choice between a traditional America founded on incentive and individual effort vs a socialist dream of equality and security regardless of one’s talents or individual drive couldn’t be clearer. But we should all agree that whatever happens next should not be shaped by biased sources of information disguised as news. Nothing less is at stake than whether Jefferson was right about the wisdom of the people or whether the tide of the media in all its forms has become a tsunami, wiping the beach clean and installing a government that is a media-ocracy. Or is it mediocrity?

Closing photos below capture a bit of my summer. The lad is my grandson Seamus, and the beautiful lady is my city councilor daughter Colleen. Thanks for reading!

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan