At the End of the Day

By Nagual

The journey of one man named Jack who searches to find his way and understand the meaning of his life experiences. During his journey he makes friends who are like-minded as he. Jack takes a trip to India where he discovers variety of things, especially that people just want to connect with other people who think like them. From Jacks point of view we are still nomadic mammals except were searching for something greater with advanced technology. Yet, as Jack ponders on so many things throughout his journey and people he meets, hes troubled about the race issue in the world and how dynamic it has become throughout the whole diaspora of the human journey. Jack wonders if human beings emotional knowledge will ever catch up to their intellectual knowledge, which remains to be seen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493147076

Nagual

I am a traveling Hippie with many stories with many purposes. On a business trip to India I met other Hippies from all over the world trapped in time, the generation of the sixties who settled deep in Goa and made it their home, avoiding sins of their colonial past. Goa became my second home, and I made many friends during my stay in Anjuna, Goa. The stories are a compellation of other stories and philosophies of many lives that passed through Anjuna. No matter wherever you go there you are. I want the world to hear their stories.

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Copyright © 2013 by Nagual.

Library of Congress Control Number:    2013921547

ISBN:    Hardcover    978-1-4931-4706-9

Softcover    978-1-4931-4705-2

eBook    978-1-4931-4707-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 12/03/2013

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CONTENTS

MOVING FORWARD

REFERENCES:

Language is the building block that bonds us together as human beings. Individuals use language to manifest thought. Once it’s understood, language can be used to create or destroy us, or to alienate us from our surroundings and from one another.

Language is more than a tool that provides definitions; it helps us to form groups, to differentiate likes from dislikes, to create equals and subordinates, to extend our authority, and expose our limitations. Human societies struggle with explaining the past, present and future, limited by language. When our emotional state and our thoughts become too complex to explain, we lose the meaning of words.

Societies that are able to explain everything with simplified language will eventually be able to create anything. At the end of the day, will society be able to emotionally handle the challenges presented by language?

MOVING FORWARD

Jack was born to a very interesting family. His mother was a rebel soldier, and his father was a local businessman from Kenya. Jack had three younger siblings, and since his mother and father were extremely busy, their grandmother who was the village shaman raised the children. She had so much to teach her grandchildren, and she took a special interest in Jack. At the age of six, a family friend poisoned Jack’s father—the first wave was complete, and a new beginning was to unfold. The loss of his father took such a great toll on the family that it caused everything to spiral out of control. Jack’s grandmother became the permanent caretaker of Jack and his siblings. Little did the grandmother nor anyone else know that Jack’s mother would send Jack far away to another country with a completely different culture. After her husband’s death, the hardships imposed on her was too much to bear, especially since the threat against her husband was also imposed on Jack, her firstborn. Jack’s mother made concession to send Jack away to be adopted by another family in another country far away from home. Detached from his mother, siblings, relatives, language, and culture, a new paradigm was beginning, with the old stored away in the crevice of Jack’s memory. It was a shock to everyone once Jack was sent away suddenly in the middle of the night. He arrived in America at the age of eight; everything seemed strange and unfamiliar to the routine he once knew back in Kenya. The second wave of Jack’s life started with severe abuse and unbelievable torture that death would have been preferable than life. Jack underwent too much unspeakable horror that he could not even bear to speak it to the point that he developed permanent bipolar disorder and thus formulated a new identity. He used a mask to cover the scars of abuse he endured from his adopted parents. Jack developed a compulsive personality and addictive behaviors that tormented him to the point he could not be satisfied with anything that life had to offer. Jack soothed himself with his new identity because the pain he suffered deep inside was too great to revisit or be remembered.

Jack knew he had to do something to escape the life he lived in his foster parents’ home, which he could not bear anymore. He tried running away several times only to be caught by the local police and get beaten by his adoptive parents with metal rods, baseball bats, hangers, and everything else his adoptive parents could get their hands on. Jack can’t remember how he made it through high school or any other public school prior to that. He was just one of those people who squeezed through the cracks; his memory only lasted for the moment. His goal was avoiding attention and keeping a low profile so no one would ask too many questions. For the most part, he had to endure everything his adoptive parents did to him. He had to wear his adoptive parents’ hand-me-down clothes. The clothes were so big that they covered up everything. But sometimes the wounds and injuries on his body were revealed to another child in his class. The kids would tease and tease until the teachers came to question what the commotion was all about. Jack knew better not to tell the truth. He was terrified of his adoptive parents, so he would lie so convincingly that he even believed in those lies himself. Jack hoped he didn’t have to endure his adoptive parents’ torture forever. One day he would be old enough to escape their home. Sometimes Jack’s lies were not believable, so he would skip school for a while. It was surprising that Jack did not get into too much trouble, but it seems to follow him around every corner. On his senior year, he was locked up for attempting to murder his adoptive parents with a butcher knife, but he was released after three weeks with no charges pressed. At the end of the day, Jack believed that everything that happened to him so far was not important as it was an outcome of the consequences of what life has chosen for him. What mattered was where he would end up from the choices he makes out of the circumstances that life brought him into the world. Once Jack reached eighteen, he left his adoptive parents’ home and never looked back. Jack enlisted in the United States military immediately after high school. After boot camp he was shipped out into the Persian Gulf War. Jack was shocked that a lot of the Iraqis were black people who spoke Arabic, but they were the enemy combatants. He was wounded in the first Gulf War in 1993 and ironically was shipped back home to where he grew up. However, Jack could not go back home at every coast. He had to find some way to get help and make new friends. He returned back a broken man and even more depressed.

After Jack returned from the war he realized that most of his friend were locked up for some drug infraction or dead. Jack to reinvent himself again, he had to start over and make new friends and in order to do so he needed to understand his societies language.

When Jack first met Sam, Jack thought Sam was not the ordinary person you see every day on the street. Sam was very eccentric and a peculiar person, which was evident by his demeanor. In a sense, you can see he was set in his own ways. Yet little did Jack know that Sam was damaged just like him. Although Sam was much older, his disposition showed that he did not care what anyone thought about him, but deep inside Sam was completely kind and honest. With every human being he met, his goal was to become the best human being he could possibly be. Sam was Jack’s apartment manager on Dover Street.

When they met, Sam shook Jack’s hand, looked him up and down, and whispered to himself, Hmm, silverback, just enough so that Jack could hear him. His first impression of Jack was a little awkward and surprising. Sam looked at Jack’s face very intently and examined all the features on Jack’s face.

Then Sam uttered the words I want to be your friend. Most people generally would just scan a person and say hello as a sign of good gesture, but on their first meeting, in an unusual manner, Sam seemed to examine Jack as if Jack is under a microscope, which would make any person feel uncomfortable. The general sort of first-impression examination is pretty simple unless if you’re Sam who most people find very strange. In that case, most people will generally scan to see if everything is okay or if the person has another state of mind. However, that is not the case with Sam. He examines and then inspects a person very thoroughly. At first, it might make a person feel very uncomfortable, but this awkward nature of Sam is one of the character traits Jack found to appreciate mostly about Sam. Jack realized much later that he did not reserve a particular behavior for certain people; it was just Sam’s genuine nature. Sam thought for a moment as he inspected Jack, and he formulated that since Jack shied away from looking intently into someone’s eyes, face to face, then Jack must have something to hide or that he did not respect the person he was speaking to unless it was a woman whom he really wanted to gain something from. Nevertheless, Sam’s stare was not threatening. His stare was only to understand at that first moment of encounter with another person whether or not an acquaintance is a friend or a foe. Furthermore, every part of Sam’s senses was heavily focused and involved in studying a person’s entire being before he gets involved in a conversation. Jack thought to himself that although this approach might seem very intrusive and judgmental. If more people use this approach, the interests of human beings might be better served, and the world might be better suited for humankind to understand one another in a thoughtful manner. At that moment,