Bound 2 None…
Bound 2 None…
Normally I don’t write things that have a set date and time. But tonight I write to record an event that has truely given me great joy to experience. I feel that a great weight as been lifted from my mind. I know the time that this great thought hit my mind. It occured at 12:58 EST, the 24th of June in the year 2001. I feel like running around outside, screaming at the top of my lungs… I am FREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now what the heck could have James Marion Long so excited? Well it is understanding a small phrase that I became fascinated with during the month of February 1989. The phrase was something that stuck me as important… so much so that I drew up a image to go along with it. Matter of fact, I had the image etched into my skin as a tatoo, that tatoo was done on March 3rd, 1989.. a couple of weeks after I initially thought of it. Yes, that is right… I have had this phrase on my body… in plain sight everyday for over 12 years and I am just getting what my subconcious understood a long long time ago.
When I first started writing, scribbling and sketching out the phrase “Bound to None” all over the place, I totally misunderstood the larger picture of what the phrase meant to me. In the early days of me having the tatoo… I tried to explain the phrase but I didn’t have the right words to say. I just knew it was important to me. Over a couple of years, I settled for a rather twisted meaning of the phrase. The meaning that used to say was that we, as men and women, are bound to many things that we can never change. Things like who your parents are, the color of your skin, your sex and where you were born… or for that matter lived for the early part of your life. The phrase “Bound 2 none” was my way of poking fun of those facts. As I will explain later, I was missing a key point of the whole phrase. I was taking a wholy negative view of the phrase and fighting against it. A very pessemistic view to take, and a very wrong one at that.
The event tonight has shown me a very different view to take of the phrase “Bound 2 None”. This event has been in the making for a very long time and isn’t some vision or revelation by any means. It is the accumulation and final understanding of information over a number of years. I can logically backtrack throught the events and bits of knowledge that have lead me to this new understanding. Some of the key things include the utter failure of long term relationship with Kim. Reading The Fountainhead in the winter of 1998-1999. The reading of Atlas Strugged during April-May of 1999. The writing of various other articles on my thought on various subjects. The recent dates that I have had. The reading of Objectivism: The philosophy of Ayn Rand. The last two things that made everything click, was a discussion with a friend of Mark’s by the name of Jason over my second dinner of Saturday and then continuing my reading of Anthem. The understanding of the phrase suddenly became clear when I finished the first sentence of page 100 of that book.
My understanding of the phrase has been transformed into the fact that I am “Bound 2 none”. I am free to think of what I want. That I am not the service of anyone in this world… the only world that matters. I do not have and will not be bound by the unthinking, the sheep of this world. Those that believe that the way things are as they are for a good reason. I am free to basically spit on that terrible phrase “For the greater good”, and all the totally misguided thinking behind it. I will and have to keep my mind clear and focused. I will not hid behind the fact that the scope of this world is beyond my ability to change it. I will not just give in and “go with the flow”. The James that wanted to quit school when he was seven years old is back!!! I was correct that our “education system” was not for someone like me, someone that saw that thinking and acting on the knowledge that we gained was something to be proud of and to be a focus point that shouldn’t be shackled, bound to a system of predetermined steps. The majority does not rule!
This is the dawn of my enlightenment. I will enjoy the coming days… the struggle is not over by a longshot and I may die a man surrounded by a society that is unable to see the truth that is all around them, but I will enjoy my life never the less. For I am finally free… to think and act as an independant person. I will no longer spend my time doubting my mind, worrying about me not “fitting” in. The Hell with fitting in!!!, it is a death trap, a death trap for the mind.
I hope that others around me do not take my statements as just some silly rant. It is more like a statement of purpose. I will try my best to denounce anything I see as negative or destructive to the individual, especially me. I cannot think for anyone else… and I will no longer even try that useless task. I will share what I know and think with anyone else that is willing to share the same. I will deal value for value (or at least potential values). I know my path will be filled with new discoveries, triumphs and failures… and I can’t wait to experience each one… with a new found relish!!!
I hope that anyone that has read this, will spend sometime getting to know themselves better, to remove the barriers and bonds of things outside of themselves and find out who they really are. Know thy self and grow. Be not afraid to think. To look at what our “leaders” are trying to get all of us to do, whether by default or force. Remember choosing the lesser of two evils… is still choosing evil. Make sure you chose not evil.
Remember, man can live alone… we all chose, mainly by default, to live with and amongst others. One of the best things you can do for yourself is be prepared to defend your choices of who you spend time and or share your personal property (money) with. Are you sharing, giving to others because of the positive values that that individual has on their own or because of association. A person that is associated with a beloved of mine is not a friend by default. Each and every person stands or falls on their own. If the brother of my wife was a murderer, he would be shown no mercy by me at all. I value personality over blood anytime, anywhere. A relative still must earn my trust and my love… point blank!
Background Information:
After reading this during some minor editing and spelling corrects in preparations for publishing on my website I felt it was high time to shed a bit more light on some of of the things that have been big turning points in my life.
As I briefly mentioned the fact that I tried to quit school when I was in the first grade ( I was 7 or so), I guess I will tell the full tale while I am at it. After being in school for a while, I had started reading and comprehending what I read at a much higher rate than all the other children in my class. I had at one point surpassed the reading material that was available in the entire school. (K-3). The teacher I had at the time just let me continue to read as fast as I could handle it. It was a great experience in itself. It was nice to be reading fourth grade material and much more. Well a great many things changed in a short period of time. My grandfather died, who due to numerous things, was my primary caregiver. Matter of fact, he took the whole thing way too far for my own good. He did everything for me, when he died, I didn’t even know how to tie my own shoes, button my shirt or even how to comb my own hair. He seemed to only care that I learn and never to be bothered with the other things at all. The lost of that was bad enough in itself, but the final blow fell only weeks later. I was to bring home my report card from school, which I did… but I did the one thing I wish I had never done at all. I read the card. By this time, we had a new teacher, who had made me go back to reading with the rest of the kids in my class (Boring… I had already everything in the class). She was rather upset that I wasn’t doing to well with her choice and wrote on my card… “James seems to think that he can learn everything and he has to learn that he cannot know everything.” Well at that moment… I realized that school had nothing left to offer me. When my grandmother got home, I told her that I quit. She asked me why and I did my best to explain my position. To my surprise, she didn’t make me go back to school. She said that I was right, that I had all the necessary skills to go ahead in life, that I could read, write and do all the basic math that I would have to use on a day to day basis. Well I managed to stay home for less than a week. I got bored and I missed my friends… the few that I had. So I told my grandmother that I was going back, but it was never the same again. I realized that school wasn’t really for learning and understanding… but some form of social event. A game to be played. I never took the eductaion system serious again. Sure, I still got good grades and was recognized as “smart”, but it wasn’t even a focal point anymore… I hated being different… and just wanted to fit in… but I already knew I couldn’t. It was a long drawn out experience that I wouldn’t “wish” on anyone.
The next big one was my brushes with “religion”. Since I was and still am a big time reader, I would spend most of my time reading. Before I was 9, I had read the whole encyclopedia set that we had at home. I finished it again a couple years later. There were many things that I read that I couldn’t really understand at all, like the whole sex thing and reproduction… I was missing some critical information for things such as that. E=mc² was also a huge stopping point, I just didn’t have the physics and math to help me understand it further. During this time of trying to understand all this, I ran across the Bible. Now that was something different to me entirely. It was like history, fairy tales and law… all wrapped in these mysterious things people called “Holy,Divine and Heavenly”. It did make a bit of sense to me, since some of the phrases were talked about in church. Since at the time, I treated all books as something to be understood and enjoyed… I tried to do the same with the Bible. That never worked. The seperating of the stories into the Old and the New Testaments was also very confusing. I personally enjoyed some of the Old Testament, I was downright entertaining at some points. God was a entity to be feared and obeyed. Failure to do so would result in some spectacular events…. brimstone (wow!) and fire raining down… a massive flood to wipe out all that walked the earth (Seemed a bit over dramatic to use water to fix a mistake… why not just make the wicked just disappear… something relatively easy for the all powerful creator to do. I mean… in the beginning of the book… he created everything out of nothing. The second part… the “New” Testament… just seemd weak to me… compared to the first part. Jesus seemed to be a pçor ûubject to base the story around… compared to the All Mighty God. Also most of the stories and principles seemed to make no sense to me at all. The meek shall inherit the earth, turn the other cheek… all that was rather wishy-washy and basically lame. Well I thought for a long time that I wasn’t getting the point… that my comprehension was lacking. So I tried to understand it more… I questioned what I read… seeking knowledge… I only got confusion and avoidance. Each Sunday that I went to church, I sat there thinking I was the only one that couldn’t follow what was “right”. It became not a duty to go, but a form of torture, that I just was supposed to endure. I even made the dreadful mistake of be baptized. If I could ever be accused of committing a sin, it was me being weak and allowing myself to be baptized. I should have stood up for myself and said no to the whole thing… then and there. Religion is nothing more than a crutch for the weak willed and a damn choke collar for those that would think. I threw the collar off… but only recently have I completely removed it from my sight. How can anyone with any mind of their own actually be part of organzations that wage war against those that do not share in their way of like. Comment assassinations and bombings in the name of God, what is that madness… it is no better than killing Jews in the name of Hitler. People will talk of all the “good” that the church does for the community and such nonsense. But those things can be done without the mind numbing chaos that is “religion”. My final straw with religion was the suicide of a pastor in my county and the Jim Jones mass murder. If religion could allow such things like that to occur… I could do without it… and I did… but I did “feel” that I was missing something. Today… I know what I was missing… it was me.
The time I spent in the military was also a big eye opener to the power that the government had on the individual. I also saw and experienced first hand, how people could utterly abuse the “authority” they were given by their positions. It was terrible. The military is a massive mess of contradicting rules, laws and policies, that are used many by the whim of those in a position to enact any of them at anytime they feel like. It is an emotion bound system… with no real rhyme or reason at all. I cherish my individualism much more nowadays after seening it constantly being suppressed for over 9 years. The military is a necessary part of any sovereign nation, but it doesn’t have to be the way it is now. The rights of an individual should never be suppressed at any cost. People should be able to quit the military anytime that they chose to no longer do the job that they volunteered to do. I think that it would be a much better organization if things like that were to be standard proceedure. The police forces of this nation are also our protectors, thou only against internal threats… and it is just as important a task as being in the military and they do not force individuals to work a for a set period of time regardless of anything. Being in the military would be just another job… that some people would be proud to do… voluntarily… at all times.
The last thing to state… is yes I have loved and lost. I failed in that relationship due to many things. I will say that I failed, because I spent too much time evading the fact that she did not share the same or even similar values that I had. That bullshit about “Opposites Attract”… only applies in science… like magnets… or certain subatomic particles. How can you value the things opposite of yourself… other than the obvious factors like sex. I mean, if you value life… why the hell would you deal with… much less be attracted to a murderer. I think it is very hard to act upon the knowledge you aquire about another and I was really weak when I came upon the knowledge that the woman I had chose to get heavily involved with had none of the values that I held in high regard. I should have ended the whole thing then and there… but I instead focused on the superfical… how smart she was, how pretty she was… that I wasn’t “alone”… all that bullshit. Those things are secondary… like icing on the cake. I need and will settle for nothing less than a like mind. I am patient, and will continue to do everything I can to be the person I should be… the best that I can be at any point in time. I am not satistfied with the way things are… and never will be… there are always more goals to set and improvements to make. Who knows… maybe I have already met someone that could be what I am looking for. Only time and sharing of ideas, thoughts and goals will tell for sure.
author- James M Long copyright 2001 ( 24Jun2001 )
